Biden's 1st 100 days live updates: Senate passes COVID relief bill along party lines

ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Mary Bruce pressed White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday about Biden's pandemic response, including his reaction to the governors of Texas and Mississippi eliminating mask mandates and allowing businesses to open at 100% capacity.

Bruce asked Psaki about the president saying those moves represented "neanderthal thinking" and asked whether that stance would help convince people to follow health measures.

Psaki said the president's comments were a "reflection of his frustration and exasperation" -- a year into the pandemic -- with decisions not consistent with science.

She also responded to a question about whether the White House would recommend people not travel to states like Texas and Mississippi as a result of those states' policies.

"We are going to continue to use every method of the bully pulpit at our disposal to convey directly to people living across the country, including in many of these states, that mask-wearing, social distancing getting access to the vaccine is the path to go back to normal," Psaki said.

Secretary of Veteran's Affairs Denis McDonough joined the White House press briefing on Thursday to discuss the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on veterans and the ongoing efforts to get veterans vaccinated.

"Countless veterans have lost jobs, closed businesses, home-schooled their own children, and faced uncertain prospects while our nation grappled with the pandemic," McDonough said. "And like the rest of the country, many veterans were directly affected by the deadly virus, with more than 230,000 veterans in our care infected by it and, sadly, 10,605 dying from the disease."

McDonough says that even though the VA has infrastructure to get the vaccines out the greatest challenge is "supply."

"So the big challenge for us is supply. From what I hear from our [doctors] is, from the moment we get it, our allotments are in arms within two to three days," McDonough said.

In addition to the U.S. airstrike last week of an Iranian-backed militia compound in Syria, another location associated with the militia in eastern Syria was supposed to be targeted, a U.S. official confirmed to ABC News Thursday, but Biden called off the strike after the presence of women and children could not be ruled out.

Biden had approved targeting both locations last Thursday morning, but later in the day, aerial reconnaissance observed women and children entering and leaving the second location. 

That movement led to concerns by military officials that they could not conclusively rule out the presence of women and children at the location when the airstrike was to have occurred in the middle of the night local Syria time.

The military’s concerns were communicated up the chain of command and Biden called off the strike on the second location.

-ABC News' Luis Martinez

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi discussed at her weekly press conference Thursday possible plots planned for the same day that pose threats to the Capitol, explaining the reasons the House voted on a policing bill named for George Floyd late Wednesday night rather than Thursday morning as originally scheduled.

"So it was really just as a convenience and, frankly, there are a lot of us," Pelosi said, referring to the size of the House compared with the Senate, which is in session Thursday. "We’re at least four times more people, and therefore, all that that implies in terms of numbers of people in the Capitol, if in fact there's any troublemakers around, and it made sense."

Pelosi also responded to questions from reporters about the possibility of adding more security, saying she recognizes it is going to take more funding to secure the Capitol.

"It's going to take more money to protect the Capitol in a way that enables people to come here, children to come and see our democracy in action, all of you to cover what happens here safely, members to be comfortable that they are safe when they are here, and not be concerned about what happened last time," Pelosi said.