If we can get 200 million shots in arms…we can be done with the pandemic based on how many the efficacy of transmission rate reduction, combined with the fact that a certain number of people have already developed immunity to this thing, we get to the point that there should be kind of a, you know, think about a network and you start turning nodes off the network. Suddenly it becomes really hard to see transmission happen across the network.View on YouTube
The prediction tied the end of the U.S. pandemic—defined as community transmission being greatly reduced and the virus having substantial difficulty spreading—to administering about 200 million vaccine doses.
The U.S. passed 200 million administered doses in April 2021, a milestone the Biden administration announced it had hit by April 22, 2021.(en.wikipedia.org) Yet, within a few months, the Delta variant became the predominant strain nationwide by late June 2021 and drove a major surge in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths during July–September 2021, including a hospital capacity crisis.(cdc.gov) This shows that, even after 200 million doses, it was not “really hard to see transmission” across the network; instead, large-scale community spread resumed.
After Delta, the Omicron wave from December 1, 2021 to February 28, 2022 produced the most intense U.S. epidemic wave to that point, with ~30 million cases and about 170,000 deaths during that period alone.(mdpi.com) Continued variant-driven waves and seasonal resurgences have persisted in subsequent years; U.S. data in 2025 still show new variants (e.g., NB.1.8.1 “Nimbus,” XFG “Stratus”) fueling nationwide summer waves rather than the virus struggling to spread.(axios.com)
Because substantial community transmission and multiple large waves occurred after the 200-million-dose mark, the specific claim that the pandemic would effectively be over in the U.S. at that point, in the sense described, did not come true.