Between fatalism, exasperation and a sense of urgency, the United States continues to suffer the ravages of a Covid-19 pandemic that has become almost out of control. The daily records of contaminations and deaths have panicked the curves with constancy for several weeks, confirming its status as the most affected country in the world with more than 388,000 deaths and 23 million people infected, according to Johns-Hopkins University. Vaccination campaigns are slipping away from the targets announced by the White House when they were launched in mid-December 2020.
Faced with this disturbing legacy, President-elect Joe Biden detailed, Thursday, January 14, the measures that his administration intends to take upon taking office on January 20. Serious and without exaggerated optimism, the Democrat pledged to “Act quickly” to get the country out of this “Dark winter”.
Its $ 1.9 trillion “bailout” of the US economy, yet to be approved by Congress, calls for $ 400 billion to be spent on wider and more efficient vaccine distribution, renewed efforts on testing. , research into SARS-CoV-2 variants and funding of protective measures allowing schools to reopen.
Mr. Biden intends to ensure the administration of 100 million vaccines in the first 100 days of his mandate. To achieve this, the Democratic administration plans to train 100,000 health workers. If the future president obtains the funding, his room for maneuver will nevertheless remain constrained by the will and capacity of States to implement these measures.
Delays and exasperation
The laborious beginnings of the vaccination campaign, described as“Heartbreaking failure” by Mr. Biden, give an idea of the scale of the task. In a country which has been relentlessly chaining the successive “waves” of the epidemic for eleven months, the arrival of two vaccines, those of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, in December raised hopes of an upcoming release from the health crisis. But the distribution difficulties showered this optimism. The Trump administration, whose gamble on the rapid discovery of a vaccine has for months obscured any other strategy to fight the pandemic, had promised the vaccination of 20 million Americans by the end of December. With just 11 million doses inoculated on January 14, only 11% of the public considered to be a priority (health personnel and residents of retirement homes) and 3.4% of the total population have been vaccinated, with strong disparities between states .
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