Good morning. President Biden shied away from an ambitious vaccination goal — but has achieved one anyway. |
 | | A vaccination site in Los Angeles.Allison Zaucha for The New York Times |
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Low expectations, good results |
Shortly after President Biden took office, I began asking his aides why their publicly announced goal for Covid-19 vaccine distribution — an average of one million shots a day — was so unambitious. The pace wasn’t much faster than what the Trump administration had achieved in its final days, and it was far short of the rate at which vaccine makers would be delivering doses to the government. Based on that delivery schedule, a reasonable goal seemed to be three million shots a day. |
White House officials responded by talking about the logistical challenges in giving so many shots. But they never explicitly denied that three million daily shots was realistic. The response left me suspecting that their true goal was closer to three million than one million, but that they wanted to set a public goal they could comfortably clear. |
Whatever you think of the P.R. strategy (and I tend to prefer transparency over artificially low expectations), the administration has now reached three million shots a day. And it deserves credit for getting there so quickly. |
 | | By The New York Times | Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention |
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Doing so has required a campaign that resembles wartime mobilization in its speed and complexity. It has involved state and local governments as well as the private sector. It has combined existing infrastructure like pharmacies with brand-new mass-vaccination clinics at sports stadiums and amusement parks. |
Over the past five days alone, more than 5 percent of Americans have received a vaccine shot. In all, nearly one-third of Americans have now received at least one shot. That’s more, on a per-capita basis, than in any other large country other than Britain. Canada and continental Europe are far behind — and Australia, Brazil, China, India and Russia have been even slower. |
 | | By The New York Times | Sources: Local governments via Our World in Data, World Bank |
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Without the acceleration in vaccinations, the number of new Covid cases in the U.S. would almost certainly have spiked in the last several weeks, as it has in much of the world. Instead, new U.S. cases have plateaued. They remain alarmingly high, but the widely predicted spring surge has not happened — so far, at least. |
 | | By The New York Times | Sources: Governments and health agencies, World Bank |
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Perhaps even more important, deaths continue to decline, partly because so many of the most vulnerable Americans, like those over age 65, have received at least one shot: |
 | | By The New York Times | Sources: State and local health agencies, United States Census Bureau |
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Now that the country has reached three million daily shots, what should the new goal be? There are parts to the answer. |
First, a more equitable distribution of vaccines would both be fairer and save more lives, epidemiologists say. In many lower-income communities — across races, but disproportionately Black and Latino — fewer people have received vaccine shots than in affluent communities. Think of it this way: Many low-risk, well-off people have received one or two shots, even as many older people in poorer communities still have not been vaccinated. |
A major reason is vaccine hesitancy, which is declining but still a significant problem, especially among Americans without college degrees. A second reason is logistical: It’s easier for professionals to spend time trying to sign up for a shot — and then going to get one — than workers who are paid by the hour. The solution, many experts say, should involve bringing more shots into communities with low vaccination rates and making it easy to get a shot. |
The second part of the answer is that three million shots a day won’t remain impressive for long. Four million will be a more sensible goal within a few weeks. Why? Combined, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer will be delivering more than four million shots a day this spring. There is no good reason that shots should languish in storage when the world is in a race against more contagious, severe variants of the virus. |
A spring surge in the U.S. remains possible. The faster that vaccines get into people’s arms, the more Americans will survive this pandemic. |
 | | A vial of the new NDV-HXP-S vaccine.Government Pharmaceutical Organi/AFP via Getty Images |
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- Democrats offered new details on their plans for raising corporate taxes. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for a global minimum rate to deter tax avoidance, while top Senate Democrats released a plan to raise taxes on multinational corporations.
- New York State lawmakers are nearing a deal to raise taxes on residents who are paid more than $1 million a year.
- Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas broke with other Republicans and vetoed a bill that would have banned some medications and surgery for transgender minors.
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 | | Members of Australia’s Parliament held signs last month to protest lawmakers’ treatment of women.Sam Mooy/Getty Images |
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 | | The Sahara Desert ant.Eduard Florin Niga |
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Lives Lived: Robert Mundell’s insights on the global economy earned him a Nobel Prize. But he may be best remembered as the intellectual father of the euro and of what became known as Reaganomics. He died at 88. |
In the ’80s, a bad date inspired the musician Nile Rodgers to write a song. The track, “Your Love Is Canceled,” played on the idea of “canceling” a person for objectionable behavior, as Clyde McGrady writes in The Washington Post. |
The phrase stuck around: Rappers and reality TV stars used it, and its popularity soared once Black users on Twitter began saying it. On social media at the time, canceling someone or something “was more like changing the channel — and telling your friends and followers about it — than demanding that the TV execs take the program off the air,” McGrady writes. That has changed in recent years. |
Like a lot of Black slang, the term was appropriated by white people and has since deviated from its more innocuous origins. It became heavily politicized, applied to everything from public figures accused of sexual assault to the gender of Potato Head toys. It has followed a similar trajectory to the term “woke,” which Black activists popularized. That term has now evolved into a “single-word summation of leftist political ideology,” as Vox reports. |
Though these are some of the latest terms lifted from Black culture, they won’t be the last. “One of the biggest exports of American culture,” a linguistics professor told The Post, “is African-American language.” |
 | | Lisa Corson for The New York Times |
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Need new book suggestions? This week, A Times book editor recommends a biography of the painter Francis Bacon and a zoologist’s speculations about alien life, among others. |
The pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were captaincy and incapacity. Here is today’s puzzle — or you can play online. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David |
Lalena Fisher, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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