A member of President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory team told CNBC on Monday that Biden plans to appeal to the Defense Production Act to boost coronavirus vaccine production.
Why it matters: The law allows the president to direct the private sector to prioritize manufacturing in the interests of national defense.
The big picture: Biden will invoke war law to ensure that “personal protective equipment, the testing capacity and the raw materials for the vaccines are adequately produced,” said Biden adviser Dr. Celine Gounder on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”.
- Gounder added that under Biden’s administration, the US will see “a great increase” in testing to detect mild and asymptomatic cases of the virus, as well as in genomic surveillance, which tracks mutations of the virus to look for new variants. tracks.
- “We didn’t do that routinely,” Gounder said, referring to genomic surveillance under the Trump administration. “We have the technology. We chose not to spend the money on that kind of public health surveillance.”
The state of affairs: The U.S. government has purchased 400 million doses of coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna through Operation Warp Speed, including a 100 million dose agreement reached with Pfizer last week following revelations that some states would receive between 25% and 40% fewer vaccine doses than originally projected.
- The US has also obtained 400 million doses of vaccines from Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Sanofi / GlaxoSmithKline that have not yet been approved by the FDA.
- Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services, has said that any American who wants a vaccine should be able to get one by June 2021.
Go deeper: Why Americans will demand to be able to prove they have been vaccinated