President-elect Joe Biden is celebrating a vote by a panel of outside advisers to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that recommended Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine be approved for emergency use.
In a statement on Thursday night, Biden acknowledged that the U.S. set a new grim milestone in terms of the daily death toll from the virus.
“But today’s recommendation by FDA’s Advisory Committee that an Emergency Use Authorization be issued for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is a bright light in a needlessly dark time,” Biden said.
“We are grateful to the scientists and researchers who developed this vaccine. And, we are grateful to the scientists and public health experts who evaluated the safety and efficacy of this vaccine free from political influence.”
The FDA is expected to officially approve Pfizer’s vaccine in a matter of days.
He added, “Vaccines don’t equal vaccinations. Our challenge now is to scale up manufacturing and distribution to distribute 100 million shots in the first 100 days of my administration. We are putting together an experienced team to do just that.”
News of the panel’s vote comes as the U.S. is seeing a massive surge of the virus. On Wednesday, the country recorded another 218,679 new cases and a record-breaking 3,055 deaths.
The country has been averaging 209,864 new cases per day, a 19% increase from the previous two weeks.
Biden continued to say that the coronavirus situation “didn’t have to be this bad.” But, he said his administration will implement a “robust and aggressive plan to contain this virus.”
“We can and will slow the spread of the disease while we manufacture and distribute this vaccine. It will take everyone doing their part: mask-wearing social distancing, and limiting their travel over the holidays,” he added.
Despite the promising news on vaccine development, health experts have been cautioning Americans that a vaccine will likely not be widely available until several months into 2021.
