Washington: US President Joe Biden announced a new goal of administering 200 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine in the United States within his first 100 days in office, double his original pledge. Biden has been in the White House since January 20, but only on Thursday, more than two months after taking office, did he hold his first formal news conference.

“Today I am setting a second goal, and that is, we will by my 100th day in office have administered 200 million shots in people’s arms,” said US President Joe Biden. Several cheat sheets used by President Joe Biden during his Thursday press conference, which also allegedly include one with the headshots and names of reporters he planned to call on.

Biden is the first chief executive in four decades to reach this point in his term without having conducted such a question-and-answer session. Biden has been on pace with his predecessors in taking questions from the press in other formats. But he tends to field just one or two informal inquiries at a time, usually in a hurried setting at the end of an event or in front of a whirring helicopter.