Biden toughens line on jab-shy workers

The United States introduced fresh moves on Thursday to accelerate vaccinations and give impetus to its belated fight against the coronavirus as the Delta variant cuts through vulnerable groups and strains hospitals.

US President Joe Biden outlined a broad plan to increase vaccination rates as new infections remain stubbornly high. Under the plan, private employers will be pressured to get their employees immunized, and shots will be mandated for federal workers, contractors and employees of healthcare facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid funding.

"Despite having an unprecedented and successful vaccination program, despite the fact that for almost five months, free vaccines have been available at 80,000 different locations, we still have nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the shot," Biden said in a speech from the White House.

The president said the new requirement for federal employees to get a COVID-19 vaccine came with no option for some to opt out and have regular testing for the virus. With the executive order extending to contractors that work with the US government, the measures will affect 2.1 million workers.

The action plan includes a six-pronged strategy focused on containing the Delta variant and boosting vaccination rates.

The speech "is a tacit acknowledgment that efforts have so far fallen short of Biden's campaign promise to bring the pandemic under control", USA Today reported.

The president's speech came at a critical point as the White House tries to refocus its strategy on restricting life for the unvaccinated, and it laid out a plan on how to bring the country's outbreak to an end after 18 months. "While Biden has had to juggle a hyperpartisan pandemic response, resistance to a federal vaccine requirement and a focus on the return to normalcy set up unrealistic expectations," the report said.

At least 75 percent of adults in the US have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, but tens of millions of people remain unvaccinated, "threatening to continue disrupting classrooms, vacations and even plans for the holidays, a frustrating reality after a summer that saw the pandemic wane before a return to mask mandates and delayed return-to-office timelines", it added.

However, state governments, notably in Republican-controlled Texas and Florida, have actively resisted imposing mask mandates, while swathes of their populations refuse to get vaccinated－even as cases around them soar.

Biden and his supporters have taken to calling the current virus surge a "pandemic of the unvaccinated".

Infections are more than 10 times higher than they need to be in order to end the pandemic, US news website Axios on Thursday quoted Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president, as saying.

There are roughly 150,000 new infections a day in the US, and "that's not even modestly good control", said Fauci. "You've got to get well below 10,000 before you start feeling comfortable."

He said only 0.5 percent of the new cases in the country are showing as the lately emerging Mu variant, with 99.3 percent testing as Delta. Fauci said the latter has such an "extraordinary ability" to transmit that it won't likely lose its global dominance in the immediate future.

Delta, so far the most troubling variant, "is similarly severe to earlier versions of the virus, probably with only modest differences in one direction or the other", The New York Times reported on Thursday.

Xinhua, Ai Heping in New York and agencies contributed to this story.