Biden tours Pfizer vaccine manufacturing plant

President Joe Biden toured a Pfizer vaccine manufacturing plant near Kalamazoo, Michigan, Friday, as extreme winter weather continued to deal the first major setback to the administration's planned swift rollout of coronavirus vaccines.

The president's trip itself was pushed back a day to Friday due to the storm affecting the nation’s capital.

Biden met with workers at a Pfizer plant that's producing one of the two federally-approved COVID-19 shots.

According to the CDC, the two-dose Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine has been administered about 30 million times since it received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration on Dec. 11.

Nonetheless bad weather forced many injection sites to temporarily close, from Texas to New England, and held up shipments of needed doses.

White House coronavirus response adviser Andy Slavitt said Friday that the federal government, states and local vaccinators are going to have to redouble efforts to catch up. The setback from sprawling winter storms comes just as the vaccination campaign seemed to be on the verge of hitting its stride.

The U.S. had administered an average of 1.7 million doses per day in the week that ended on Tuesday, evidence that the pace of the vaccination program was picking up. Now, the question is how long it will take to recover from the impact of the weather-related delays.

Slavitt said all the backlogged doses should be delivered in the next several days, confident that the pace of vaccinations will recover.