The White House is expected to announce that it will not reach President Joe Biden’s previously set vaccination goal by July 4th, according to a report by NBC News.
NBC News reported that “The Biden administration planned to concede Tuesday that it will likely fall short of President Joe Biden’s goal of partially vaccinating 70 percent of American adults by Independence Day,” adding that “Jeffrey Zients, the head of the White House Covid-19 response team, was slated to announce that the administration has hit its 70 percent vaccination target among Americans ages 30 and older, and is poised to reach that threshold for those 27 and older by the Fourth of July.”
“But it will take ‘a few extra weeks’ to include all Americans 18 and older to that group, he is to acknowledge,” NBC News reported.
“The reality is, many younger Americans have felt like Covid-19 is not something that impacts them and have been less eager to get the shot,” he is expected to note, according to advance remarks obtained by the outlet.
“We always intended July 4 as a moment to take stock and celebrate the progress we’ve made. But by no means was it an end point,” a senior administration official said, per the outlet. “What really matters is what the country feels like and what Americans are safely able to do. Restaurants and schools have been able to reopen. There will be celebrations that are very different than what we talked about even a few weeks ago.”
NBC News reported that the official, pointing to “lags in reporting data especially around weekends and holidays, said the White House will still come remarkably close to reaching the president’s goal, even if it’s not clear until days after. And they denied that the administration was moving the goal posts by highlighting the 70 percent benchmark among a slightly narrower range of adults.”
The administration official seemed to attempt to change the narrative about the White House’s vaccination goal after many states have reopened and even gotten rid of their mask mandates for vaccinated individuals.
“I think for us, it’s less about the number and more about, does America look like America again? Have we protected some of our most vulnerable?” the official told NBC News. “Not only is the answer yes, but we’ve done it much faster than we anticipated.”
Per the outlet, Zients is also expected to restate that the Biden administration will advance its vaccination efforts past Independence Day.
“With the delta variant now spreading across the country and infecting younger people worldwide, it is more important than ever that they take this important step,” Zients plans to state.
In May, Biden announced that he was setting a goal “for 70% of the U.S. adult population to have one vaccine shot and 160 million U.S. adults to be fully vaccinated by July 4 so that life can start to look closer to normal,” per a White House fact sheet.
As The Daily Wire reported, Zients was asked about the goal during a press briefing last week and seemed to avoid directly addressing the issue.
“We’ve made tremendous progress. Today more than 175 million Americans have gotten at least one shot … hundreds of thousands of people are continuing to get their first shot each day, and we are going to get to 70 percent, and we’re going to continue across the summer months to push beyond 70 percent,” Zients said, per The Hill.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated that as of June 22, 65.4% of the adult population have received one dose of the vaccine and 55.9% of adults are fully vaccinated. It added that 144,273,772 adults are fully vaccinated, both numbers still short of Biden’s previously stated goal.