The president of United States, Joe Biden, will announce this afternoon the mandatory vaccination against coronavirus covid-19 of all employees of the federal government, a total of 2.1 million people, reported this Thursday the US media.

Biden is scheduled to announce the decision in a speech from the White House at 5:00 p.m. local time (9:00 p.m. GMT).

In it, the president will outline his plans to stop the advance of the Delta variant in the country and its strategy of administering a third dose of the vaccine to reinforce immunity among the population.

Biden will reinforce, in this way, the demands on federal employees who until now had the option of not being vaccinated if they underwent COVID-19 tests on a regular basis.

In addition, he will require the same requirement from contractors working with the federal government, and will pressure private companies to do the same.

In late August, the Department of Defense ordered the vaccination of all its soldiers, both active and reserve, as part of the drive to increase inoculation among the American population.

53.3% of Americans have received the full schedule of covid-19 vaccines, including 62.4% of those over 12 years of age, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

However, the regional distribution is highly uneven, with particular concern in the southern US, in states such as Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, where vaccination levels are much lower.

The expansion of the delta variant has returned a gloomy outlook to the United States, the country with the most deaths from covid-19 in the world, whose daily average number of cases exceeded 150,000 again last week for the first time since January, which it has saturated hospitals and causes more than a thousand deaths every day.

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