As former President Donald Trump left office this week amid a
deadly pandemic he
gave up trying to control, he also left a broken vaccine distribution program that has hung millions of vulnerable seniors and front line workers across the United States out to dry. Deceptive and inadequate communication with states has resulted in mass confusion and made effective state planning impossible, while intransigence in cooperating with the presidential transition has left the incoming Administration facing an even greater challenge than the monumental one that was already waiting for them.
As Biden took reins of the federal government this week, his administration has
found“no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of from the Trump administration,” with White House Covid coordinator Jeff Zients
saying “What we’re inheriting is so much worse than we could have imagined.”
Zients
emphasized the stark difference in leadership and the challenges Biden is left to bear; “For almost a year now, Americans could not look to the federal government for any strategy, let alone a comprehensive approach to respond to Covid,” Zients said. “And we’ve seen the tragic costs of that failure. As President Biden steps into office today … that’ll change tomorrow.”
This comes on the heels of what was previously reported last Tuesday when Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar
announced that the federal government would begin releasing coronavirus vaccine doses held in reserve for second shots. However, “
no such reserve existed”.
Because of this, health officials across the country who relied on estimates provided by the Trump administration warn that without them, millions of adults 65 and older and front-line essential workers who were supposed to get the vaccine this month under phase 1b will not be able to get vaccinated until supply increases.
Vaccinations were already going at an alarmingly
slow rate. The goal of Operation Warp Speed was to ensure that 80 percent of the country’s 330.7 million people get the shots by late June. To meet that goal, a little more than 3 million people would have to get the shots each day, according to an
NBC news analysis. However, 2 weeks after the first shot was administered, only 2 million doses were administered total, a pace that would take the US 10 years to reach 80 percent vaccinated. Nearly 1 month after the first doses were administered, the United States has only just administered 1 million vaccines in a single day, far short of the 3 million per day goal. Meanwhile, other countries continue to far outpace U.S. vaccination efforts. Israel has
given a first dose to 25.34 out of 100 people per its population while the US has only vaccinated around 3.71 out of 100 of its population.
This was a foreseeable and avoidable situation. In May 2020, Trump repeatedly made
alarming comments that the virus might go away on its own, vaccine or not. Immunization experts sent the leaders of Operation Warp Speed a
letter asking for guidance on a vaccine rollout back in June 2020. Senate Democrats unveiled a
comprehensive roadmap to administer a safe and effective vaccine to all in July.
A week later, President Trump
says the government is “all set to march” on the vaccine rollout, that “the delivery system is all set logistically,” and it will be “spectacular.” The following month, Trump accused the “Deep State” of hindering the vaccine rollout to hurt him politically. In September, he got into a public disagreement with CDC Director Redfield who said that the vaccine would not be available to the general public until summer of 2021. The following day, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows
saidthey would have 100 million doses of vaccine ready by the end of October of 2020, and 300 million ready in January of 2021.
As recently as December 10, 2020, Vice President Pence said 20 million Americans would have the vaccine by year’s end. Instead, 3.2 million doses had been administered on December 31, according to the
Bloomberg vaccination tracker.
(full article online)
www.americanprogressaction.org
www.npr.org
