Biden outlines 5 steps the administration will take to get more Americans vaccinated
Delivering remarks at the White House on Tuesday, President Biden pleaded with unvaccinated Americans to get inoculated for COVID-19, and outlined five actions his administration plans to take to get more people vaccinated.
Video Transcript
JOE BIDEN: Study, after study, after study has shown that, since early May, virtually every COVID-19 hospitalization and death in the United States has been among the unvaccinated. So, if you're vaccinated, you're protected. But if you're unvaccinated, you're not, and you're putting yourself, and more importantly, maybe, from your perspective, your family and your friends at risk. So, please, get vaccinated now. It works. It's free. And it's never been easier, and it's never been more important. Do it now, for yourself and the people you care about, for your neighborhood, for your country. It sounds corny, but it's a patriotic thing to do.
In today's briefing, we discussed how our administration is going to devote the remainder of the summer to a special focus on five ways to make gains in getting those of you who are unvaccinated vaccinated. Because here's the deal. We are continuing to wind down the mass vaccination sites that did so much in the spring to rapidly vaccinate those eager to get their first shot, and their second shot, for that matter, if they needed a second. Now we need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and, oftentimes, door to door, literally knocking on doors, to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus.
Look, equity and equality remains at the heart of our responsibility of ensuring the communities that are the hardest hit by the virus have the information and the access to get vaccinated. So, as we shift from these centralized mass vaccination sites, where we were doing thousands of people a day, we're going to put even more emphasis on getting vaccinated in your community, close to home, conveniently, at a location you're already familiar with.
The first thing we're going to do, this includes 42,000 local pharmacies, where folks with questions can talk to the pharmacist they know and already have dealt with. These locations overwhelmingly allow you to walk in without an appointment, and get the vaccination when you're picking up your prescription or just going in to get your toothpaste or something else you need from a drugstore. Second, my team is going to place renewed emphasis on getting the vaccines to more and more family doctors and health care providers, so more Americans can get the shot at their doctor's office from the folks that they know and they trust the most.
The third thing we're going to do, we're going to step up efforts to get vaccines to your family doctors and other doctors who serve younger people, so that adolescents ages 12 to 18 can get vaccinated as they go for back-to-school checkups or getting ready for their physicals they need for fall sports. Fourth, we're also intensifying our efforts to meet people where they are outside of their neighborhood's pharmacies and doctor's office. This includes continuing to work with employers to make vaccination shots available at work, on the work site, if possible, and/or give their employees paid time off to get vaccinated at a nearby facility. And fifth and finally, we're sending out more mobile clinic units out there to help people at special events, summer festivals, sporting events, as well as places of worship, wherever we can find people gathered.
