President Biden is adjusting expectations for the summer’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout. On May 4, Biden announced a new goal for the country: By July 4, 70% of U.S. adults will have at least one shot, and 160 million U.S. adults will be fully vaccinated.

May 5: Where Do We Stand?56.7% of U.S. adults have at least one shot106 million U.S. adults are fully vaccinated (41.3%)

May 5: Where Do We Stand?

56.7% of U.S. adults have at least one shot106 million U.S. adults are fully vaccinated (41.3%)

The number of first doses administered has declined sharply since April 13—the day that the government paused the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to investigate rare but serious cases of blood clots.The pause,which is now over, may have deterred people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated.

Fewer people getting first doses means less of the population is on its way to immunization. As a result, our prediction of when the country will achieve herd immunity—a nebulous figure to begin with that was pegged somewhere around 70% or higher—has been pushed from July to August. AsThe New York Timesreported this week, many experts think that we’ll never achieve herd immunity at all. Several factors are influencing this reality, like the stubbornly persistent anti-vaccination cohort and rising COVID variants.

Improving Vaccine Access Will Help the U.S. Meet Its Goal

Over 44% of the U.S. population has had at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. That figure is higher—56.7%—when looking exclusively at the adult population. Whether or not the country will pick up the extra 13.3 percentage points to hit the 70% goal in the next two months could come down to making vaccination more accessible and convenient.

To that end, Biden has announced a series of tactics and funding measures to bring shots directly to the people who may not have otherwise gotten one. Steps the administration is taking to close the vaccine gaps include:

Vaccine Allocation Will Begin to Change for States

Up until now, a state could roll any unordered vaccines from its weekly allocation into the following weeks. However, as general vaccine demand dips, the federal government is moving to more of a use-it-or-lose it model. If states do not order their full vaccine allocation, the doses will be reallocated to a federal pool and distributed to places with the greatest need.

That doesn’t mean that states will be left in a lurch—governors will be able to work with the federal government to adjust their vaccine allocation if demand rises again.

As a result of this change, we may begin to see a decrease in the country’s vaccine efficiency rate—the percentage of available doses actually making it into arms each week. For the past few months, this rate has hovered around 80%, regardless of waning vaccine enthusiasm, because states have been ordering less and less from the government.

Take the first week of April, for example. As of April 5, the government had delivered a total of 207,891,395 vaccine doses to the states—27 million more than the week before—and 166,512,412 were administered. This means 80% of available doses were administered.

A month later, even amid the decrease in first shot appointments and Johnson & Johnson vaccine blunders, 79% of available doses are still being administered. But between the last week of April and the first week of May, the government only added 22 million doses to the national total.

5 Sources

Verywell Health uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read oureditorial processto learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.COVID-19 Vaccinations in the United States.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Joint CDC and FDA Statement on Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 Vaccine.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.How COVID-19 Vaccines Get to You.

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