For Miosotis Garcia, her COVID-19 vaccination was a long time coming.
What You Need To Know
- First lady Jill Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci visit COVID-19 vaccination sites in Central Florida and Tampa
- The pair stopped at a drive-thru site in Kissimmee before heading to Amalie Arena in Tampa
- Demand for the vaccine is waning in Florida; the effort is to encourage hesitant people to get vaccinated
- RELATED: First lady Jill Biden to visit Florida Thursday in continued vaccine push
"I was waiting to go through the process with my family doctor," she said Thursday, because "I want to try to get back to normal life."
Pulling up into a Kissimmee drive-thru vaccination site, she was surprised to be greeted by none other than first lady Jill Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“It’s so fast you don’t even feel it,” Biden said.
The pair were in Kissimmee, south of Orlando, as part of the Biden administration's nationwide tour to promote vaccination. Later in the day, they headed to Tampa's Amalie Arena, where workers at a pop-up vaccination event called "Shots on Ice" were administering vaccines as part of a promotion with the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Osceola Community Health Services, a nonprofit, set up the drive-thru vaccine event in Kissimmee to highlight the ease of getting vaccinated and to promote its mobile outreach efforts.
“We are going to be successful, as President Biden says... We’re going to get as many people vaccinated, well beyond his goal which we will reach, and then what will happen, we’ll put this behind us. Vaccination is the solution,” Fauci said.
Jeremy Lanier with the Florida Department of Health in Osceola County said that 57% of residents age 12 and older are vaccinated, but "we have seen a decrease in demand."
That squares with national trends, which is what has brought Biden and Fauci to Florida. The Sunshine State said that while it's distributed more than 10 million doses, it has returned 5.7 million doses back to the federal government as of June 15 so they could be used elsewhere.
Dr. Raul Pino, the director of Orange County's Health Department, said the challenge now is not just COVID-19 itself, but misconceptions about the vaccine.
"We understand some people may have religious concerns, political concerns, but there’s a huge segment of the population that has not been vaccinated, that’s just afraid because they have the wrong information," Pino said.
The first lady and second couple have been touring the nation in an effort to hit the president’s July 4 goal of having 70% of U.S. adults with at least one vaccine dose. Vice President Kamala Harris was recently in Atlanta and Greenville, S.C., with second gentleman Doug Emhoff and members of the president’s cabinet.
The White House acknowledged earlier this week that the U.S. will fall short of its 70% goal by July 4, "so our job now is to make sure that those folks who are waiting on the sidelines, have access, who may be hesitant, have access to the education (and) are reassured that these vaccines are safe, effective, proven, and can greatly reduce the chance of transmission," Lanier said.