It Will Be “Very Difficult” To Reach Herd Immunity Before The Summer, Joe Biden To Norah O’Donnell
CBS News aired another excerpt of Norah O’Donnell’s interview with Joe Biden as part of the Super Bowl pre-game, and the president was asked whether he could go to vaccine manufacturers Moderna and Pfizer and tell them, “We need more production.”
“Yes. I think, because we’ve already done it,” Biden said. “But the idea that this can be done and we can get to herd immunity much before the end of next– this summer, is– is very difficult.”
O’Donnell had noted that at the current rate of the vaccine rollout, the U.S. would not reach 75% herd immunity for another year.
Biden said that when he came into office, a disappointment was that “the circumstance relating to how the administration was handling COVID was even more dire than we thought.”
he Trump administration,” Biden said “We thought they had indicated there was a lot more vaccine available. And didn’t turn out to be the case. So that’s why we’ve ramped up every way we can.”
CBS News has been airing excerpts of Biden’s sit down with O’Donnell throughout the weekend, continuing a tradition in which the network with the rights to each year’s Super Bowl lands an interview with the president. The first excerpts of the interview with Biden ran on CBS Evening News on Friday, and other portions were shown on CBS Weekend News and Face the Nation.
Biden also addressed the fraught issue of school reopenings, as O’Donnell noted that about 20 million children have not been in a classroom for nearly a year, with a mental health crisis and women dropping out of the workforce.
“Is this a national emergency?” O’Donnell asked Biden.
“It is a national emergency. It genuinely is a national emergency,” he said.
She then asked him whether it was time for schools to reopen.
“I think it’s time for schools to reopen safely. Safely,” Biden said. “You have to have fewer people in the classroom. You have to have ventilation systems that have been reworked. Our CDC commissioner is gonna be coming out with science-based judgment, within I think as early as Wednesday as to lay out what the minimum
requirements are.”
