“This was an idea that really came up last year in the Trump administration — the public health agencies recommended it, President Trump vetoed it for some reason,” Klain told NBC’s Lester Holt. “We want to get this back on track. I hope in the next few days, or next week, we may be able to announce some progress on this.”
The Biden administration’s professed amenability to the proposal comes after US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky appeared to cast doubt on whether sending Americans masks would necessarily convince those who did not already wear them to do so. When asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper last week if it made sense for the federal government to send masks to American households, she replied that “it’s not entirely clear to me that the reason people aren’t wearing masks is because they don’t have access to them.”
“Certainly, I would highly advocate for those in areas where they’re under-resourced and they can’t purchase masks or they don’t have access to masks, we need to make sure that people have the protection,” Walensky continued. ‘But it’s not entirely clear in my mind that the challenge of mask wearing has been one of access.”
On Thursday, Klain again defended the administration’s target of getting 100 million people vaccinated for Covid-19 in its first 100 days, telling Holt that “we’re trying to ramp up vaccine production and vaccine distribution — we’ll have more to say about the targets that come after.”
Klain rebuffed Holt’s point that the Trump administration managed to hit 1 million doses of vaccine administered per day, asserting that “the Trump administration hit a million shots a day one day out of 40.”
“A question’s been raised about whether or not these checks should go to people who make $200,000, $300,000,” Klain said. “I think if Congress has ideas on how to focus this to make sure that working people, middle-class people, in this country get these checks, we’re fine with that idea.”
“What we’re not going to do is leave out large swaths of the middle class, and we’re certainly not going to compromise and reduce the amount of these checks,” he added.
About 78% of families would qualify for relief payments under the Republican proposal, while 95% would be eligible under Biden’s proposal, according to analysts at the Penn Wharton Budget Model, who warned that the figures are preliminary since no formal legislative text is available yet.
CNN’s Katie Lobosco and Phil Mattingly…
Read More: Chief of staff Ron Klain: White House hopes to revive Trump plan to mail masks to Americans