Biden orders double purchase of COVID-19 pills after record of cases

The president of United States, Joe BidenOn Tuesday, he ordered his Government to double the order it had made of pills against COVID-19 manufactured by Pfizer, given the strong increase in infections in the country.

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In a meeting with his COVID-19 response team at the White House, Biden announced that he had decided to raise to 20 million the number of treatments of the antiviral pill, known as Paxlovid, which was commissioned by the United States Government and of which he initially announced a purchase of 10 million.

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“We had already made the largest order (of these tablets) in the world, and now I am going to double that order,” said Biden, who assured that the United States may “need even more” than those 20 million units.

Pfizer’s pill, authorized in December in the United States, is the first oral treatment against COVID-19 that Americans will be able to take at home, and Biden is confident that they will allow “drastically reduce the number of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19” in the country.

The first COVID-19 pills began to be distributed in the United States at the end of December, and the White House expects that by June the 20 million treatments that were ordered will have been distributed, according to official sources cited by the CBS network.

Biden clarified, however, that “it literally takes months to make a pill” of the Pfizer pills due to the “chemical complexity” of the pills, which explains the delay in their delivery to Americans.

The president acknowledged that the increase in infections, related in part to the expansion of the omicron variant of the coronavirus, is causing havoc in the country and warned that cases will continue to rise in the coming weeks.

He acknowledged that he is “frustrated” by the long lines of people waiting to be tested for COVID-19, and recalled that his Government has commissioned 500 million tests that will be distributed at home, although these will not begin to be distributed until the end of this month White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki later said.

The United States registered more than a million new cases of COVID-19 this Monday, the record since the start of the pandemic, according to the independent count carried out by Johns Hopkins University.

In addition, on the same day, more than 103,000 Americans were hospitalized with the disease, representing a 27% increase in hospitalizations in the last week, according to an analysis by the Washington Post, which nevertheless indicates that the average number of deaths daily rates due to the coronavirus fell 8%.

Only 62% of the population of the United States is vaccinated with the complete schedule against COVID-19 – without counting the booster doses – and Biden insisted on Tuesday that the pandemic continues to hit the unimmunized with more force.

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Deshawn