Biden announces plan to buy another 100 million J&J doses and appears with the CEOs

President Biden announced Wednesday that he is directing his administration to purchase an additional 100 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, at an event with J&J CEO Alex Gorsky and Merck CEO Ken Frazier.

Why are more doses needed? The White House said while there is already enough in the pipeline for every US adult by the end of May, these extra doses could help vaccinate children, or serve as booster doses if those become necessary to fight variants of the virus.

There’s also the issue of other countries. “If we have a surplus we’re going to share it with the rest of the world,” Biden said, noting the US has already committed $4 billion to Covax, the United Nations program for distributing the vaccine across the world.

“This is not something that can be stopped by a fence, no matter how high you build a fence or a wall,” Biden said. “So we’re not going to be ultimately safe until the world is safe. We’re going to start off making sure Americans are taken care of first, but we’re then going to try to help the rest of the world.”

Primetime speech coming tomorrow: Previewing his primetime address to the nation on Thursday night, Biden said he is “going to talk about what comes next. I’m going to launch the next phase of the COVID response and explain what we will do as a government, and what we will ask of the American people.”