Fact Checking President Biden’s Town Hall Claims About the Vaccine Rollout

The president’s statement is false.

Published October 25, 2021

At a town hall Thursday night in Baltimore, hosted by CNN and moderated by Anderson Cooper, President Joe Biden made a false claim regarding his involvement in the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

At one point during the event, Biden told Cooper: “When I first got elected—when I first was elected, there were only 2 million people who had COVID shots in the United States of America—had the vaccine. Now we got 190 million, because I went out and bought everything I could do.”

This is a false statement.

As we mentioned in an earlier fact check, the first COVID-19 vaccine was first administered on December 14, which means that there were no COVID vaccines administered in November, when Biden was first elected.

We also noted, per the Bloomberg COVID-19 vaccine tracker, there were 927,000 COVID doses recorded on January 19, the day before Biden’s first day in office. In total, by January 20, according to the Washington Post, there were about 21 million COVID-19 vaccines administered.

In December 2020, Donald Trump doubled the purchase of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines (set to deliver at the end of July 2020), bringing the total number of combined Moderna and Pfizer vaccines to 400 million.

Furthermore, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office: “As of December 31, 2020, the government had at least 800 million vaccine doses under contract expected to be delivered by July 31, 2021, pending any issues with clinical trials, EUA issuance.”

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Khaya Himmelman

Khaya Himmelman is a fact checker for The Dispatch. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and Barnard College.

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