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Joe Biden's Big Goal On Vaccines Will Need To Get Even Bigger

A hundred million shots in a hundred days.

President-elect Joe Biden’s signature pledge for fighting the coronavirus pandemic dates back to December, a time when it felt audacious and maybe even a little brash given that the COVID-19 vaccines did not have federal approval yet. More than a month later, the goal still seems lofty, given all the well-publicized stories of confusion, delays and shortages from across the country.

But the pace of vaccination in the U.S. has picked up since the start of the new year. When Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, assured the public this weekend that Biden’s goal is “absolutely a doable thing,” he may have actually understated the case.

Nobody is taking Biden’s goal for granted, and nobody should. It would still represent progress. But getting the nation back to something resembling normality in the next year will require an even quicker pace of vaccination. And that won’t be easy.

Why Getting To A Million A Day Would Be An Achievement

The math is reasonably straightforward. A hundred million shots over the next hundred days, as Biden has promised, works out to 1 million shots per day. That’s higher than the current rate, although the gap is much smaller than it used to be.

As of Tuesday, the seven-day average for vaccines administered was 807,000, according to tracking by Bloomberg News. That average has been mostly rising since December, when the two vaccines now in use, one from Moderna and one from Pfizer-BioNTech, first got federal approval.

The average rate could easily hit Biden’s goal of 1 million a day sometime in the next few weeks ― if current trends continue.

Something many of us thought was aspirational now seems a lot more likely to happen. But we shouldn’t stop there. Amesh Adalja, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

That’s still a big “if,” to be clear, because of all the problems still plaguing the rollout. One is an inconsistent...

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