Officials also brokered an unusual partnership between Johnson & Johnson and a longtime competitor, Merck & Co. The Trump administration repeatedly explored using Merck’s plants to bolster vaccine production but never reached an agreement.
Mr. Zients, the pandemic adviser, said on Sunday that the new alliance had helped the Biden administration set its new May goal. In fact, though, Merck is likely to bottle only a few million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine by then, according to people familiar with its operation. The main benefit of the partnership will come later in the year, when Merck will have retooled a huge plant with the capacity to produce as many as 100 million doses of vaccine a month, they said.
Beyond the nuts and bolts of production, Mr. Biden’s White House has pursued a starkly different messaging campaign than Mr. Trump’s: underpromise, and then try to overdeliver. Mr. Trump routinely boasted of imminent achievements, including a vaccine rollout before Election Day, only to fall short. By contrast, health experts complained, at least initially, that Mr. Biden was overly cautious.
When the vaccine rollout began in December, Mr. Biden vowed that his administration would average one million shots a day during his first 100 days in office — enough to vaccinate 50 million people by the end of March.
After less than a week in office, he raised the goal by 50 percent, to 1.5 million shots per day. The nation passed Mr. Biden’s initial target about a month ahead of schedule and is now averaging 2.17 million doses per day.
Carefully calibrated goals “avoid losses,” said David Axelrod, the senior strategist for President Barack Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012. “Certainly they must have learned that lesson from watching Trump.”
“Internally, you drive to the highest possible goal you can make. Externally, you set a floor that you are reasonably confident you can achieve,” he said.
Katie Rogers and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Susan Beachy contributed research.