JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Vice President Kamala Harris urged the public to receive vaccinations during a visit on Monday to Florida, a Republican-led state that has largely remained open for business despite concerns that doing so may prolong the pandemic.
Ms. Harris, who in the past week has traveled the country to promote the particulars of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, said she did not have a specific message from the administration to a state where a prominent coronavirus variant has spread, even as officials have aggressively courted tourists for an unmasked spring break season that has spiraled out of control.
“I’m here to emphasize the importance of vaccinations and getting the vaccine,” Ms. Harris told reporters shortly after landing in Jacksonville. “One thing is for sure, if you get vaccinated when it’s your turn, you are much more likely to avoid contracting Covid.”
Ms. Harris later visited a food pantry and outlined the benefits in the stimulus package for poor families. Though her portfolio of responsibilities has remained undefined, in practice, she has been an all-purpose messenger for an administration grappling with sizable problems on multiple fronts.
In Jacksonville, she fielded a question from a reporter on whether she would visit the U.S.-Mexico border: “Not today,” she quipped.
While she is on the road, one of her biggest practical hurdles is a deeply partisan landscape that threatens to throw up obstacles to the administration’s agenda, including infrastructure. The administration has tried to emphasize that the economic and public health recovery from a devastating pandemic should be bipartisan, but the White House’s effort to promote the coronavirus relief package and growing vaccination effort around the country has not been politically unified in practice.
Few Republicans attended the vice president’s appearances on Monday. Symone Sanders, the vice president’s spokeswoman, told reporters that Ms. Harris’s office had reached out to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, and “the entire Florida delegation.” Lenny Curry, the Republican mayor of Jacksonville, greeted Ms. Harris.
In recent days, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has opened up mass vaccination sites in Miami, Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville, which can each administer 3,000 shots a day. The rollout so far has been marred by confusion and bottlenecks.
The Florida Division of Emergency Management, which has partnered with FEMA to operate the mass vaccination sites, said on Monday that Floridians could continue to get first doses at those locations through April 7. That was a reversal from last week, when the state said the sites would begin giving only second doses on March 24. Frustrated state residents noted that thousands of first doses had gone unused in some of the sites because of eligibility rules limiting access to younger people and some essential workers.
“Until now, Florida’s vaccination rollout has systematically advantaged those with resources, and disadvantaged those without,” Alison Yager, the executive director of the Florida Health Justice Project, a nonprofit that promotes equitable access to health care, said in an email. “I very much hope that her visit will prompt Florida’s leadership to consider how we can change course, to ensure that the vaccination process, moving forward, prioritizes access for members of our most marginalized communities.”
Florida has logged more than two million cases of coronavirus since the pandemic began, according to a New York Times database. As Ms. Harris visited the FEMA-run site in Jacksonville, which was situated in tented buildings outside a palm-tree-lined strip mall, hundreds were in line for a vaccine. She made small talk with a tour guide and a woman receiving the vaccination, and posed for photos.
Later on Monday, Ms. Harris hosted an event at Feeding Northeast Florida, a food pantry, to emphasize how the relief package can help poor families. After years of the Trump administration tightening access to food stamps, the stimulus package expands benefits on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by $230 a month through the end of September. Some 45 million people rely on the program.
“The work that we did on the American Rescue Plan was designed with you mind,” Ms. Harris told a round table of local participants, including Representative Al Lawson, Democrat of Florida.
She also said that benefits for children on free and reduced lunch in schools would be extended through the end of the pandemic. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, she said, will also see an infusion of $880 million. Ms. Harris then listed off a number of other benefits, including an expanded child tax credit and health care assistance.
“This is meant to be a public education campaign,” she said. “So people know what they’re entitled to receive.”
Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting from Miami.
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