I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, May 6th.

We're going to talk now about ways to and ways not to convince people who haven't yet decided to get the COVID vaccine

to get them. As you might have heard in President Biden's speeches and various appearances

over the last week, he has set a goal to fully vaccinate 160 million U.S. adults by the 4th of July. This is partly new yesterday.

He said his goal now is to get at least one vaccine dose into 70% of the nation's adult

population by that time. That would be really good. 70% is what a lot of the experts say is needed

for herd immunity, where there just aren't enough people for the virus to keep getting passed

around, that it starts to die out. And very importantly as well, doesn't have the opportunity

to mutate very much and develop vaccine-resistant variants.

So 70 percent.

That's a very ambitious goal by the 4th of July.

And Biden's outreach plan prioritizes pop-up and mobile vaccine sites as well as walk-in

appointments at places like pharmacies.

Federal dollars will go to

support local outreach efforts to create more trust in the vaccine, focusing on low-income communities

and rural parts of the country where uptake rates are relatively low.

But it's possible that in that big televised address to the nation last week on day 99,

that Biden gave his message in exactly the wrong way.

Here's what he said.

Go get vaccinated America. Go and get the vaccination. They're available.

So I don't know. Maybe he was kind of barking and lecturing at people in a way that isn't really going to go get vaccinated. You know, I hope it works, because I'm definitely on his side on this,

but, you know, I don't know. By contrast, the Washington Post had a piece this week on vaccine

...