Biden hails ‘enormous progress’ during first year in office | Joe Biden News

On eve of one-year mark of his presidency, Joe Biden vows to continue tackling key challenges, including COVID-19.

Joe Biden has said his administration achieved “enormous progress” during his first year in office, but the US president stressed that he would continue to tackle key challenges facing the United States, notably COVID-19.

Speaking one day before his presidency hits the one-year mark, Biden on Wednesday highlighted his administration’s achievements, including getting millions of Americans vaccinated, combating unemployment and signing a massive infrastructure bill.

“It’s been a year of challenges, but it’s also been a year of enormous progress,” he told reporters during a news conference from the White House.

Biden promised to complete the US’s post-pandemic economic recovery, and also talked up his administration’s efforts to combat the coronavirus, including recent initiatives to provide free at-home testing and N95 masks to people across the country.

The president faced criticism over test kit shortages and long lines at testing sites around the holiday season last month, which coincided with the spread of the Omicron variant.

“Should we have done more testing earlier? Yes,” Biden said on Wednesday. “But we’re doing more now. We’ve gone from zero at-home tests a year ago, to 375 million tests on the market in just this month.”

When Biden came to office, the mass vaccination programme was just kicking off, weeks after federal regulators granted emergency authorisation to several vaccines.

The president lauded his government’s vaccination push, as US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) figures show that 67 percent of eligible Americans above five years of age are fully vaccinated, and nearly 80 percent have received at least one dose.

But inoculation efforts plateaued months into the Biden administration, hitting a wall of vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccination attitudes fuelled by misinformation. As of mid-December, 15 percent of all American adults had not received a single jab, according to government data.

On Wednesday, Biden renewed his plea for Americans to get their jabs, including booster shots for those eligible. “We’re going to stick with our vaccination efforts because vaccinations works. So get vaccinate, please, and get your booster,” he said.

The president also ruled out returning to lockdowns and school closure, saying that the virus “won’t be a crisis but something to protect against and a threat”.

Roadblocks in Congress

While Biden won the most votes of any US presidential candidate in history when he defeated Donald Trump in 2020, his ambitious plan to expand the social safety net, contain the pandemic and reverse some of his predecessor’s hardline policies has hit setbacks on Capitol Hill.

The president’s approval ratings plummeted to as low as 40 percent in recent weeks, as two conservative US senators from Biden’s own Democratic Party have upset his agenda.

Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, dealt a big blow to the administration when he announced that he would not support Biden’s Build Back Better legislation, a giant spending bill that aimed to boost social programmes and investments in green energy.

Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema have also voiced opposition to Democrats’ efforts to abolish a Senate rule known as the filibuster in their push to pass legislation that would protect US voting rights.

To pass voting rights bills, Democrats needed to abolish or at least weaken the filibuster, which enables the minority party in the 100-member Senate to block major legislation by requiring a 60-vote threshold for bills to pass.

On Wednesday, Biden pledged to continue to work with senators to move his agenda forward.

“I didn’t over-promise,” he said. “I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen.”