President Joe Biden promised that the United States will be armed with COVID-19 vaccines designed to address new variants of the disease as they arrive.
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The administration will “be able to deploy new vaccines within 100 days instead of many more months or years,” Biden said during his first State of the Union address on Tuesday.
“I cannot promise a new variant won’t come. But I can promise you we’ll do everything within our power to be ready if it does,” he said.
The U.S. has only recently emerged from the onslaught of the omicron variant, which, at its peak, was causing more than 933,000 cases per day in the week leading up to Jan. 14, according to New York Times tracking. The weekly average number of new cases is now down to about 107,000 per day. Hospitalizations, meanwhile, have fallen 44% over the past two weeks. Roughly 50,000 people on average have been in hospitals receiving treatment for COVID-19 every day this past week.
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The two mRNA vaccines currently in use in the U.S. from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna rely on technologies that can be tailored relatively easily to target a specific variant of COVID-19. For instance, Pfizer announced in January that it was researching an omicron variant vaccine for use in adults ages 18-55.
The mRNA vaccines were created and authorized in less than a year since the coronavirus appeared in the U.S., a feat that cut short what would normally take multiple years or up to a decade to do. Vaccine and treatment makers relied on the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar vaccine and treatment development initiative, Operation Warp Speed, which was a massive effort to get shots in arms quickly.
