President Biden used his prime-time address Thursday sketch out the next phase of his pandemic response, including deploying 4,000 active-duty troops to help with coronavirus vaccination; spending nearly $40 billion on screening to open up schools; scaling up efforts to track worrisome new variants; and launching a new website in early May to make it easier for people to get their shots.
Mr. Biden also announced that he is directing states to make the vaccine available to all adults no later than May 1, and said that if Americans continued to abide by social distancing and other public health guidelines, they could expect some semblance of a return to normalcy by July 4. He said people could look forward to gathering — if in small groups — for neighborhood cookouts and the like.
Mr. Biden’s remarks came just hours after he signed a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, his first major legislative achievement as president. Senior administration officials previewed the address to reporters late Thursday afternoon.
The speech, coming one year to the day after the World Health Organization declared that the world was in pandemic, gave Mr. Biden an opportunity to lay out the specifics of his plan to bring the nation out of the worst public health crisis in a century. The president also used the occasion to offer Americans a sense of hope as the country emerges from what he has repeatedly described as a “dark winter.”
Mr. Biden’s decision to invoke the Fourth of July holiday marked the first time that he has offered a specific date for when things might look more like normal. One senior official said that as the nation approaches Independence Day, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will provide public health advice to guide Americans “as they travel, participate in small gatherings and go to work and houses of worship.”
Earlier Thursday, the administration announced that it intends to deliver coronavirus vaccine to an additional 700 of the nation’s 1,300 community health centers, bringing the total number of centers involved to 950. The federal government’s pharmacy vaccination program will also be expanded, officials said, to include more than 20,000 pharmacies across the nation.
Some of the steps Mr. Biden is taking are directly related to provisions in the stimulus package. The bill includes $1.7 billion that will allow the administration to dramatically scale up genomic sequencing of samples of the virus — a task that is essential to tracking and staying ahead of new variants.
The bill also includes $130 billion for school reopening, which will help school departments pay for supplies and staff to comply with the C.D.C.’s reopening guidelines. The federal Department of Health and Human Services will also award $650 million in what officials described as an “initial investment” to expand testing in elementary and middle schools.
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