President Joe Biden and his team are planning another coronavirus speech on Thursday, to detail a “six-pronged strategy” to fight the ongoing pandemic, the White House announced Tuesday.
The president will deliver his speech after polling showed his support for his handling the pandemic has fallen 12 points since April.
A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll shows 52 percent of Americans now support Biden’s handling the pandemic down from 64 percent in April.
Biden continues to struggle as the delta variant of the coronavirus spreads across the country.
In July, the president surrendered to federal health officials who asked for more mask mandates in response to the resurgent spread of the virus — even for those Americans who got vaccinated.
Biden blamed the resurgence of the virus on the unvaccinated population while Dr. Anthony Fauci is keeping his focus on the need for masks for all – at all times.
“We have a pandemic, because of the unvaccinated and they’re sowing enormous confusion,” Biden said in July, adding, “If those other 100 million got vaccinated, we’d be in a very different world.”
The president pressed businesses to require vaccines for their employees to drive up vaccination rates and announced his own requirement for federal employees to get vaccinated or submit to onerous testing and social distancing protocols.
Biden has also struggled to push forward on plans to get Americans to take vaccine booster shots after studies showed reduced effectiveness of their ability to fight off the delta variant.
Two Food and Drug Administration officials resigned in protest of the differences in strategy despite Biden’s repeated insistence he would “follow the science” on vaccination issues.