president joe biden will use the first
full day of his presidency
to launch an array of plans as he turns
the page on four tumultuous years of
donald trump
healthcare the economy and immigration
are all said to be priorities
but it's fighting the coronavirus
pandemic that will be at the heart of mr
biden's policy initiatives
among the measures already announced
halting the united states withdrawal
from the world health organization
the president will also announce his
intent to join the kovacs vaccine
facility
that aims to deliver vaccines to poor
countries that's been confirmed by his
chief medical advisor anthony fauci
in the last few hours mars wearing
already compulsory on federal property
will be mandated on many trains
airplanes and intercity buses as well
announcements about some of those
changes were made by the
us's top infectious diseases expert dr
anthony fauci
i am honored to announce that the united
states
will remain a member of the world health
organization
the united states plans to work
multilaterally
to respond to and recover from the covet
19
pandemic president biden
will issue a directive laid a directive
later today
which will include the intent of the
united states to join
kovacs and support the act
accelerator to advance multilateral
efforts
for covet 19 vaccine therapeutic
and diagnostic distribution equitable
access
and research and development that was
uh dr anthony fauci there well our
correspondent in washington gary
o'donoghue
has been monitoring events for us and
says tackling the pandemic
is at the forefront of president biden's
priorities
we're expecting to hear from him in
person later on today
setting out some of these measures
possibly signing another 10 or so
executive actions which always looks uh
good doesn't it looks like you're doing
something but he
faces a huge challenge yesterday was the
second
largest death toll we've had since the
the pandemic more than 4
200 people lost their lives in the
united states
yesterday and just to give you some kind
of scale
of what they're facing here and this is
in their own documentation they say
the amer america has four percent of the
world's population we have 25 percent of
the cases
and 20 of the deaths so there is a
problem here in america
not least with vaccine distribution
which they're also saying
they're going to have to start from
scratch again with
indeed a huge problem with 400 000 uh
dead and that number continuing to rise
daily so gary
these executive orders are signed just
help our audience understand
how do they actually become i suppose
federalized
well this is power that the um that the
president has
as chief executive of the administration
effectively this is
power already delegated to him under the
constitution under
existing legislation so he can do this
stuff
i mean it's limited in terms of how much
money
you can spend i mean it was it's within
existing budgets etc or
in existing discretionary budgets but
this sort of stuff can be done
because you saw i mean quite a lot was
done by president trump through
executive
action as well and some of the most
controversial things were done through
executive action by donald trump so you
know what you can
sign away with a pen you can undo with a
pen uh which is uh part of the
the system here so he will hope some of
that can be done but a lot of the sort
of
heavy lifting when it comes to the
pandemic is going to have to
fall on legislation so this 1.9 trillion
dollar bill
that he wants congress to pass that will
give a lot of money
to local states in particular to
businesses
uh to individuals as well to try and
cope with the the consequences of the
pandemic and indeed
with the the business of getting it
under control
gary o'donoghue there well in europe the
german chancellor angela merkel has
welcomed the start of joe biden's
presidency in the united states
saying she sees a much broader scope for
political agreement
in france president macron said the
inauguration was a significant day
for the american people but our paris
correspondent hugh schofield says beyond
the initial congratulations there are
tricky issues ahead
like most european countries there's an
initial reaction which is of course
overwhelmingly favorable and delighted
and
relieved that relieved that the the kind
of unpredictability of the last
few years is over and that there's a
return or promises to be returned to
conventional classical multilateralism
in which
normal people do normal things and hold
normal meetings uh that aren't disrupted
in ways that no one can
can foresee so that's a massive relief
too but i mean the second reaction kicks
in straight away and you're hearing this
not just here but across
europe of course that any attempt to see
the situation today as a simple return
to the status quo
ante and to welcome it or to wish it was
so is false
as well apart from anything else the
relationship with obama was not all
sweetness and light
but on top of that of course the world
has changed president trump may have
been reviled over here but he has
done things which some people um the
effect of which some people welcome her
one of those in particular is very
important in france which is
the kind of forging of a kind of
european sense of
unity um it's very easy and handy
uh to have a kind of common not enemy
but suddenly a kind of hate figure
and in trump that's what france and
germany had and the other nations of
europe
as well of course and that meant that
the french agenda for pushing a more
sovereign europe particularly in
the field of defense was encouraged and
advanced
um that is still what uh president
macron wants
but he's aware uh that um there might be
a temptation from some european
countries
to go back to their instinct to look to
america as as the sort of protecting
agent
and his view would be that that's wrong
the top the world has changed america's
attention is elsewhere
and it is up to europe uh to
pursue uh this sort of sovereign
idea um all the more forcefully even
though there is now a more friendly
figure in washington
hugh schofield reporting there