President-elect Biden has also vowed to reduce drug costs and to allow Medicare, a U.S. government health insurance program, to negotiate drug prices. He has support from Congressional Democrats to pass such legislation, which the Congressional Budget Office has said could cost the industry more than $300 billion by 2029.

A total of 345,000 have died of COVID-19, or one out of every 950 U.S. residents, since the virus first emerged in China late in 2019. 
An analysis of Reuters data shows it took 200 days to reach the first 5 million cases, 93 days to go from 5 million cases to 10 million, 31 days from 10 million to 15 million cases and only 25 days to go from 15 million to 20 million cases.

California has the most total cases of any state, with about 2.28 million infections followed by Texas with 1.76 million cases and Florida with 1.32 million cases.

Fauci’s comments on Tuesday came after the US registered a record high 65,000 deaths in the past 28 days, making December the worst month for coronavirus fatalities since the start of the pandemic.

December’s figure, roughly equivalent to over 1.6 Americans lost to the virus every minute, marked a significant surge from that in the entire month of November which registered 36,964 fatalities.

The country’s overall the overall death toll currently stood at 338,544, the highest in the world, according to the Johns Hopkins University.