The United States partially reached President Joe Biden’s vaccination goal on Monday, as 70% of American adults have now received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, the Biden administration fell short of its July 4 vaccination goal.
In May, President Joe 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,” as detailed in a White House fact sheet.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of Monday, 156,500,924 adults in the U.S. were fully vaccinated and 60.6% of the adult population was fully vaccinated. The agency showed that 70% of adults have gotten at least one dose. The number of adults who have received one dose was 180,762,301 people.
The news comes after the CDC reversed its masking guidance for fully-vaccinated individuals last week, causing confusion across the country. Several companies have notified their employees that they will be required to get the COVID-19 vaccine before returning to work.
In addition, some local jurisdictions are pushing for indoor mask-wearing for fully-vaccinated individuals while some school districts are doing the same for schools in the fall.
As The Daily Wire reported, Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio pressed the public to wear masks inside, regardless of vaccination status, on Monday.
“We want to strongly recommend that people wear a mask in indoor settings even if you’re vaccinated,” he said during a briefing. “Now this is particularly true, of course, if you might be around anyone unvaccinated.”
“Vaccines are the number one most powerful weapon against COVID by far,” de Blasio said. “But we also clearly believe there’s a place for masks. Everything thing we do is vaccine-centric. The entire strategy is around vaccines, but of course, we want to make sure people are using masks in all the right way.”
City Health Commissioner Dave Chokshi said the decision came after new information revealed the delta variant “can spread even more easily than previously thought.”
“While vaccination may be ‘for the win,’ we need to keep putting points on the board against the virus, and that’s where masks come in,” Chokshi said.
Other lawmakers have pushed to maintain individual freedoms and liberties with regard to mask-wearing. Last week, Republican Florida Ron DeSantis signed an executive order in an effort to put the decision of whether or not children wear masks in the hands of their parents.
“Today, Governor Ron DeSantis issued Executive Order 21-175, in response to several Florida school boards considering or implementing mask mandates in their schools after the Biden Administration issued unscientific and inconsistent recommendations that school-aged children wear masks,” the governor’s office said in a statement on Friday. “The Florida Department of Health will enter rulemaking in collaboration with the Florida Department of Education to protect parents’ freedom to choose whether their children wear masks.”
DeSantis said at a news conference where he signed the order that “the federal government has no right to tell parents that in order for their kids to attend school in person, they must be forced to wear a mask all day, every day.”
The executive order came after some districts have moved to potentially require masks to be worn at schools in the fall after the CDC reversed its guidance.