Biden to discuss Covid response after US misses vaccination target – live | US news

Jen Psaki confirmed an earlier Wall Street Journal report that national security adviser Jake Sullivan will meet with Saudi Arabia’s deputy defense minister in Washington this week.

The Saudi deputy defense minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman, is the son of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and a younger brother of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The Biden administration has implicated the crown prince in the 2018 killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and Psaki indicated that issue could possibly come up during the Saudi official’s meeting with Sullivan.

Jen Psaki gave some details on Joe Biden’s trip tomorrow to Crystal Lake, Illinois, saying he will promote the bipartisan infrastructure framework.

The press secretary said Biden will also explain the need to enact his American Families Plan, which congressional Democrats hope to pass via reconciliation, meaning they will not have to get any Republican support to approve the proposal.

Biden has made several trips in recent weeks to promote his infrastructure plans, most recently traveling to La Crosse, Wisconsin, last week.

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, is now holding her daily briefing, and she opened her remarks with a preview of Joe Biden’s speech this afternoon.

Psaki said the president will outline the administration’s reinvigorated efforts to get more Americans vaccinated against coronavirus, which she said is critically important because “fully vaccinated people are protected against the Delta variant”.

The press secretary explained that the administration is launching door-to-door outreach efforts in communities with lower vaccination rates and working to get more doses to primary care doctors and pediatricians in those communities.

Psaki also announced that the US is shipping 1.5 million doses of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine to Guatemala and 2 million doses of the Moderna vaccine to Vietnam, confirming an earlier report.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

• Joe Biden will deliver an update this afternoon on his administration’s ongoing efforts to vaccinate more Americans against coronavirus. The update comes after the country missed Biden’s goal of having 70% of Americans adults at least partially vaccinated by July 4. A senior administration official said the president will outline the White House’s plans to launch targeted outreach efforts in communities with lower vaccination rates.
• Today marks six months since the Capitol insurrection. The anniversary comes as some of Donald Trump’s supporters are working to deny the reality of that violent day, which resulted in five deaths.
• The death toll in the Surfside condo building collapse rose to 32, after four more bodies were recovered. Local officials said 113 people remain potentially unaccounted for, as search and rescue teams brace for heavy rains from Tropical Storm Elsa that could affect the disaster site.

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

The US continues to distribute more coronavirus vaccines to other nations, with 2 million doses being shipped to Vietnam today.

AFP reports:

The Moderna vaccine shipment — part of a first 80 million doses that President Joe Biden has pledged to allocate worldwide — should arrive in Vietnam this weekend, a White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.

‘This is just the beginning of doses being shipped to southeast Asia,’ the official said.

A million doses went to Malaysia on Monday and last week the White House announced delivery ‘soon’ of four million doses to Indonesia.

Biden had initially pledged to ship 80 million vaccine doses abroad by the end of June, but the White House fell short of that goal.

Jeff Zients, the coordinator of the White House pandemic response team, said on Friday that the White House was working to deliver tens of millions of additional doses over the next couple of months.

The death toll in the Surfside condo building collapse has risen to 32, after rescue crews discovered four more bodies in the rubble.

Miami-Dade County mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced the news at a press conference this morning, noting that 113 people remain potentially unaccounted for.

Of those 113 people, detectives have only been able to confirm that 70 of them were definitely in the building when it collapsed, so that number may change as investigation efforts continue.

“We continue to urge all of the families who are missing loved ones to please reach out and connect with us so that our detectives can file missing persons reports with the police, and we want to confirm every single account,” Levine Cava said.

The press conference came as local officials braced for potentially heavy rains from Tropical Storm Elsa, which could complicate the search and rescue efforts.

In his remarks this afternoon, Joe Biden will also note that nearly 160 million Americans are expected to be fully vaccinated against coronavirus by the end of the week.

As of today, 157.3 million Americans are fully vaccinated, representing 47.4% of the total population, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Biden had previously set a goal of having 160 million Americans fully vaccinated by US independence day on July 4, but the country fell short of that objective.

Joe Biden will use his speech this afternoon to outline five major areas where his administration is doubling down on community outreach efforts to get more Americans vaccinated, a senior administration official said.

The White House official said, “After the President is briefed by his COVID-19 response team, he will speak to the American people about the strong progress that the country has made in recovery because of its robust vaccination campaign, as well as the importance of every eligible American getting vaccinated, especially as the Delta variant continues to grow among unvaccinated people across the country.”

The official noted that Biden will describe how his administration is continuing to work with state and local leaders “to get more Americans vaccinated by making vaccines available in more health care settings, and respond to hotspots”.

Specifically, the White House is working to distribute more vaccine doses to primary care doctors and pediatricians, so local leaders in the medical community can directly explain the benefits of the vaccines to their patients.

The administration is also expanding targeted community outreach efforts, mobile vaccine clinics and vaccination sites at workplaces to make it as easy as possible for Americans to get their shot.

Democratic congressman Andy Kim, who famously cleaned the halls of Congress after the January 6 insurrection, is donating the suit he wore that day to the Smithsonian Institution.

In a Twitter thread, Kim described how he wore the suit on January 6 to celebrate Democrats flipping the Senate, after their two victories in the Georgia runoff races.

“I bought it to be a suit of celebration, and I thought what better way to give the suit meaning than to wear it when I confirm the electoral college and then later to the inauguration,” Kim said.

Kim noted that he only wore the suit one more time after January 6 — when he voted to impeach Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection on January 13. After that, he could barely bring himself to even look at the suit.

“In the following days, I started to receive thousands of cards from across the country,” Kim said. “They talked about the blue suit. The suit meant something different to them than it did to me.”

Kim said he hoped the suit would be one piece of an exhibit that tells the truth of January 6, as many Trump supporters try to deny the reality of that violent day.

“I told the Smithsonian yes to donating the blue suit because the telling of the story of [January 6] isn’t optional, it is necessary,” Kim said. “We cannot heal as a nation unless we have truth. Let truth be truth.”

Jeff Zients, the coordinator of the White House pandemic response team, acknowledged that lower vaccination rates among younger Americans contributed to the US missing its July 4 vaccination goal.

Speaking to ABC News on Sunday, Zients said the country still had “a lot to celebrate” for its independence day, noting that 67% of American adults have received at least one vaccine dose.

He went on to say, “Younger people, particularly those in their 20’s, have felt less vulnerable to the disease and therefore less eager to get shots.”

Zients noted the dangers for unvaccinated Americans as the delta variant spreads, saying, “We need to continue to vaccinate everyone, particularly young people, because what we know is, if you are vaccinated, you’re protected. And if you’re not vaccinated, you’re not protected. And that’s particularly important for everyone, including young people, in light of the delta variant.”

But according to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 74% of unvaccinated Americans say they will not get a shot.

In his address over the weekend to mark US independence day, Joe Biden urged all Americans to get vaccinated as quickly as possible, arguing it is the “patriotic” thing to do.

“We all know powerful variants have emerged, like the Delta variant, but the best defense against these variants is to get vaccinated,” the president told an audience at the White House, where invited frontline workers gathered to celebrate the holiday.

“My fellow Americans, it’s the most patriotic thing you can do. So, please, if you haven’t gotten vaccinated, do it. Do it now for yourself, for your loved ones, for your community, and for your country.”

Biden’s speech came as vaccination rates lag in many Republican-led states that he did not win in November, intensifying concerns that political polarization is affecting the country’s pandemic response.

The Guardian’s Edward Helmore reports:

Several Republican governors with lagging vaccine rates in their states have urged residents to accept the shots as the Biden administration comes under pressure to reopen US borders to overseas visitors.

The Arkansas governor, Asa Hutchinson, West Virginia’s Jim Justice and Spencer Cox of Utah warned against vaccine hesitancy, which some disease experts, including the White House chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, said could create “two types of America”.

“We are in a race,” Hutchinson said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. About 32% of people in Arkansas are fully vaccinated, compared with 47.9% nationwide, according to Johns Hopkins University. “If we stopped right here, and we didn’t get a greater per cent of our population vaccinated, then we’re going to have trouble in the next school year and over the winter.” The solution, he said, “is the vaccinations”.

Justice told ABC’s This Week: “Red states probably have a lot of people that are very, very conservative in their thinking and they think, ‘Well, I don’t have to do that.’ But they’re not thinking right.”

Greetings from Washington, live blog readers.

Joe Biden will speak this afternoon on his administration’s ongoing efforts to get Americans vaccinated against coronavirus.

The speech comes two days after the country failed to meet Biden’s goal of having 70% of American adults at least partially vaccinated by July 4, the US independence day.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 67.1% of American adults have now received at least one vaccine dose, and 58.2% of adults are fully vaccinated.

However, there are large regional disparities in vaccination rates. The CDC director, Dr Rochelle Walensky, noted last week that there are about 1,000 US counties where less than 30% of the community is vaccinated.

As the more highly contagious delta variant of coronavirus continues to spread, those communities could be at much higher risk of outbreaks, as Dr Anthony Fauci warned in an interview on Sunday.

“Fortunately, we have a substantial proportion of the population vaccinated. So it’s going to be regional,” Fauci told NBC News. “We’re going to see, and I’ve said, almost two types of America.”

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.