While the vaccine news is certainly welcome, let us not forget that for the next 45 days Trump and his appointees are still in charge. And this crew is known for making big promises and not delivering. We’re dealing with massive logistical challenges here that will take lots of knowledge and experience to sort out. Be afraid.
A panel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week announced its guidelines for the first phase of the most ambitious national vaccination campaign in modern history.
Yet beyond the guidelines advising states about how to deploy their vaccines — and a large Defense Department operation to deliver them — the Trump administration hasn’t prepared for a major federal role, a lack of planning that is causing significant anxiety among state and local health officials.
The distribution details are being left to states, so availability will depend a lot on your state government. As I live in Missouri, I am screwed. It will be a mess here.
The significant checklist of unmet federal responsibilities underscores the challenges ahead for President-elect Joe Biden, who inherits most of the burden for executing a successful nationwide campaign to vaccinate all Americans, potentially without the billions of dollars in additional funding that will be needed.
That’s the other thing. The states are broke, thanks to the pandemic and Trump’s abdication of federal responsibility. Congress allocated money to Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, but it’s not clear how that money is being spent. My impression is that the Trumpers have already gone over budget mostly on buying up vaccine doses and other supplies for the stockpile, but more money will be needed to pay for distribution. So we may be about to shift from Operation Warp Speed to Operation Where’s the Bleeping Vaccine?
Public health experts say state and local governments are underfunded and unprepared for what is expected to be the largest vaccination campaign in U.S. history.
While the Trump administration has spent more than $10 billion supporting the development of COVID-19 vaccines, just $340 million has been allocated to agencies below the federal level to help with distribution efforts that will cost anywhere from $6 billion to $13.3 billion, according to various estimates. …
…“We knew vaccines would be in development, so it’s not a surprise we would need to build up the deployment system. Now we could be weeks away from the first doses going out, and we really haven’t invested in any of that work,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs at the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO).
“Things could have been done earlier without having to reach this level of emergency,” she added. “To not have put a single dime toward deployment of it is a real disservice.”
Congress could have allocated this money already, of course, but Mitch McConnell thinks states should just go bankrupt and everybody should just die already.
“I’m not getting a sense from Congress that there’s tremendous urgency on this,” said Topher Spiro, vice president for health policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP).
“This effort is going to be on par, or should be on par, with landing a man on the moon. It should be one of the largest efforts ever undertaken by governments, and it’s really important to get it right to restore faith in the government, and I don’t understand why Congress would nickel and dime this funding. There’s a huge risk of underfunding vaccine distribution, which would be catastrophic,” he added.
I think it’s safe to say there will be some catastrophes.
Part of the problem is that the Trump Administration has totally screwed up data collection. They recommend giving the vaccine to health care workers first, which is sensible, but the only distribution plan at hand is based on the adult populations of states. Public health expert Sema K. Sgaier writes in U.S. News that this will create winners and losers among the states.
This is why we should be concerned about Operation Warp Speed’s recently announced plan to deliver the first 6.4 million vaccine doses to states within 24 hours of Food and Drug Administration approval – not based on prioritized risk groups but on population.
Distributing the very first, precious supply of available vaccines based only on each state’s adult population will lead to unequal distribution of the vaccine among health care workers – our highest-priority population – due to the simple fact that some states have a larger share of health care workers than others. Why should your chances of getting vaccinated depend on whether you happen to be a nurse in West Virginia or Wyoming? For this reason, Operation Warp Speed’s plan to ignore the data on where priority groups live and work is neither fair nor strategic.
While 6.4 million doses may sound like a lot, it’s meager when you think about how many health care workers we need to vaccinate as soon as possible: Using the free, open-access vaccine allocation planning tool for states that we at Surgo Foundation developed in partnership with Ariadne Labs, we find that with the initial batch of 6.4 million doses announced by Operation Warp Speed, only 17% of our highest-priority health care workers will be covered.
Basically, the Trumpers are just dumping the mess on the incoming administration.
President-elect Joe Biden said Friday that the Trump administration had shared information with his transition team about distributing a vaccine to various states, but Biden said his team had not seen a “detailed plan.”
“There is no detailed plan that we’ve seen, anyway, as to how you get the vaccine out of a container, into an injection syringe, into somebody’s arm,” Biden said at an event in Wilmington, Delaware.
“It’s going to be very difficult for that to be done and it’s a very expensive proposition,” Biden said. He noted, “There’s a lot more that has to be done.”
Yes, there’s a lot more that needs to be done, and Trump’s incompetence will no doubt make vaccine distribution to take longer and be much more haghazard than it might have been. See also What We Know About the U.S. COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution Plan.
Close-up medical syringe with a vaccine.