“This was not our first preference. This was not our objective,” Psaki said in an interview Friday morning. “We wanted to try everything we could to give people the option to protect themselves.”

She noted that the White House initially believed more people would get vaccinated, particularly given that vaccines were developed under a Republican president who made a point of getting vaccinated himself.

More recently, she said, officials also hoped that full Food and Drug Administration approval of the two-shot Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine would entice more people to get it. “You hope, right? It was approved by the FDA weeks ago,” Psaki said. “Eighty million people are still not vaccinated.”