Biden calls for faster vaccination of teachers as he admits no timeline for school reopening

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President Biden got a hearty round of applause during a socially distant CNN town hall event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday night when he said America needs to be vaccinating its teachers a lot sooner.

“There’s a lot of things we can do,” Mr Biden said in a response to a question from a father of four in the audience about when schools would re-open. “I think that we should be vaccinating teachers. We should move them up in the hierarchy as well,” he added, to the approval of the audience.

The federal government makes recommendations on whom should be vaccinated when, and many places choose to follow them, but the decision of how to order the vaccine rollout ultimately rests with individual states.

During the event, Mr Biden said at current rates there would be more than 600 million doses of the vaccine out in the country, enough to vaccinate every American.

Mr Biden stopped short, however, of offering host Anderson Cooper an exact date of when all this vaccination would mean elementary and middle schools would be fully open.

“I think we’ll be close to that by the end of the first 100 days,” he said. “We’ve had a significant percentage of them be open. My guess is they’re probably going to be pushing to be open all summer, to continue like it’s a different semester.”

On a bigger scale, the president also wasn’t ready to hammer down a date when the pandemic could be over and life would be back to normal, but said the country would be in “a very different circumstance” by next Christmas, as current vaccinations continue to scale up and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is on its way.

“A year from now, I think that there will be significantly fewer people having to be socially distanced, have to wear a mask, but we don’t know,” Mr Biden said.

The president took questions from members of the public on a whole host of questions at the event in Milwaukee’s Pabst Theatre, part of his first official trip since being sworn in. Members of the audience, including those who voted for and against him during the 2020 election, grilled him on topics ranging from defunding the police to student loan forgiveness.