President Joe Biden promised that the first White House COVID-19 briefing of the Biden-Harris administration would feature “bringing back the pros to talk about COVID in an unvarnished way,” and the experts certainly lived up to that expectation.
Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that their latest forecast indicates that the U.S. could see 479,000 to 514,000 deaths by Feb. 20, 2021.
"I know this is not news we all want to hear,” she said. “But this is something we must say so we're all aware.”
Jeff Zeints, the White House Coronavirus Coordinator, echoed Biden’s message, saying that health officials will always level with the public and stick to the science.
Zeints, the former National Economic Council director in the Obama administration, said that the Department of Health and Human Services will act Wednesday to make more qualified individuals available to administer COVID-19 vaccinations, including retired nurses and doctors, and will allow them to administer vaccinations across state lines.
Wednesday’s briefing was the first of its kind in the Biden-Harris administration, which will take place multiple times per week and will be led by the administration’s medical experts focusing on the pandemic, as well as treatments and vaccinations.
The new briefings are intended to be a stinging rebuke of the former administration, which would often see former president Donald Trump taking center stage — muddling and eventually muzzling the nation’s top infectious disease experts as the death toll worsened.
In an interview with CNN last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and now Biden’s chief medical advisor, said that Trump’s lack of candor and facts “very likely did” cost lives.
Dr. Fauci, at Wednesday's briefing, said that there's reason to be concerned about the emerging COVID-19 variants on vaccines, though there is a lot scientists can do in order to adjust and maintain the effectiveness of vaccines.
Dr. Fauci stressed that there is a protective "cushion" of effectiveness, and the level of protection is within that cushion, and said that one vaccine in development is being tested against the variants that were detected in Brazil and South Africa, which he called a promising development.
The first such briefing from the Biden-Harris team comes one day after the world hit the grim milestone of 100 million COVID-19 cases; the United States leads the world in coronavirus cases (over 25 million) and deaths (over 425,000), according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
President Biden pledged Tuesday to "always level with you about the state of affairs" as he pushes social distancing measures and mask-wearing on a populace already weary as the pandemic stretches into its second year.
The briefing featured Fauci, Zeints, and Walensky, as well as Zeints’ deputy, Andy Slavitt, and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, the chair of Biden’s COVID-19 equality task force.
Biden has signed a number of executive actions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, including ordering mandating masks and social distancing on federal property, requiring masks at airports, on commercial aircraft, and on other forms of transportation, coordinating a federal response to the pandemic, and invoking the Defense Production Act to ramp up supplies for tests, vaccinations, and personal protective equipment.