Biden faces pivotal moment with COVID-19 speech

President Biden is facing rising COVID-19 challenges as he prepares to lay out new steps in the pandemic fight on Thursday.

The president will use a speech on Thursday to try to demonstrate he has a handle on the situation.

But after the pandemic receded in the United States earlier in the summer, the highly contagious delta variant has fueled a new spike, rising to roughly 150,000 cases and over 1,000 deaths per day.

This spike is different from those of last year, in that vaccines are now widely available, meaning the risk is now overwhelmingly for the unvaccinated.

While experts say there certainly is more the federal government can do, they also say part of the challenge is that a segment of the American population is simply refusing to get the vaccine, allowing the virus to continue to spread.

Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said it is important to “identify what the problem is here, and that is the anti-vaccine movement.”

“This isn’t like what it was last year,” he added. “This is willful.”

What’s coming in the speech? The full details aren’t yet clear, but it’s a six-part plan.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that the six steps Biden will announce Thursday will include “requiring more vaccinations,” as well as boosting testing and “making it safer for kids to go to school.”

Psaki said that while the administration has made progress after fighting the pandemic for months, she acknowledged that “he’s going to lay out these six steps tomorrow because we have more work to do.”