President-elect Joe Biden and incoming first lady Jill Biden
received initial injections of the coronavirus vaccine on Monday in
a show of support for the inoculation.
“I’m doing this to demonstrate that people should be
prepared when it’s available to take the vaccine,” Biden said.
“There’s nothing to worry about. I’m looking forward to the
second shot.”
The Bidens’ vaccinations come less than a week after a
member of the press corps covering the transition and
Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, the president-elect’s chosen
director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, tested
positive for Covid-19.
Richmond’s
diagnosis is one of the closest known brushes with the
deadly virus for Biden, who at 78 is at a heightened risk of
complications from the disease and has gone to considerable lengths
to minimize the risk of exposure during the presidential campaign
and ensuing transition.
“We’re still in the thick of this,” Biden said as cases,
hospitalizations and deaths continue to mount across the country.
“There’s millions of people out there that are going to need
this.”
The Bidens received shots manufactured by Pfizer, one of two
immunizations granted emergency authorization by the Food and Drug
Administration earlier this month.
The two join Vice President Mike Pence among the list of
political leaders who have received shots in recent days. Pence and
his wife, Karen, got vaccinated during a televised event on Friday
morning alongside Surgeon General Jerome Adams, with the vice
president promising to the country that “hope is on the
way.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi also received shots from the Capitol’s attending physician
on Friday.
Noticeably absent from that list: President Donald Trump. The
White House has been circumspect about when the president — who
tested positive for Covid-19 at the beginning of October and was
subsequently hospitalized — would get vaccinated or whether he
would do so in public,
despite urging from the head of the Trump
administration’s signature vaccine development operation and
others.
Trump also
nixed plans to have White House staffers be among the
first to obtain access to the vaccine, preferring that shots
instead be reserved for other priority groups. Other top government
health officials have also had to wait for their turn to get the
highly anticipated vaccine.
POLITICO
first reported earlier Monday that Anthony Fauci, the
nation’s top infectious disease expert, Human Services Secretary
Alex Azar and National Institutes of Health Director Francis
Collins are among those scheduled to receive doses of the vaccine
manufactured by Moderna at an NIH event on Tuesday. NIH had
yet to receive a single shipment of the vaccine as of
Friday, despite playing a meaningful role in developing Moderna’s
vaccine, which the FDA authorized for emergency use Friday
night.
Both use a similar mechanism to stimulate the body’s immune
response, and shipments of both products have begun to go out
throughout the country, where state and local governments are
overseeing their individualized distribution plans for allocating
their allotments at the ground level.
Broadly speaking, the first batch is being reserved for
frontline health care workers and people in some of the
highest-risk groups, though there has been some consternation about
politicians and certain nonmedical health care employees receiving
doses over other staffers while supplies remain scarce.
Several members of Congress have confirmed receiving the first
of two rounds of the shot — which are administered weeks apart
— both as part of an effort to combat vaccine hesitancy and to
ensure continuity of government if disaster struck the Capitol.
Adams, the surgeon general, said on Monday there is “symbolic
value” in elected leaders getting vaccinated if it bolsters
support for the shots in certain groups that have been
disproportionately affected by the virus’s toll.
“We need them to have the confidence to get vaccinated,” he
said on Fox News. “It’s not the vaccines, it’s the
vaccination that matters.”
