“The United States fell far short of its goal of vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020, and many health officials are frustrated immunizations aren’t moving faster, especially as Covid-19 infections and deaths spike nationwide.
“Some public health experts have focused on the supply side, pressing vaccine manufacturers to pick up the pace and urging the federal government to send out doses to individual states faster, which led both President-elect Joe Biden and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to promise to release all available reserve doses.
“But officials also say the rollout is also facing delays because vaccination sites don’t have enough capacity, which explains why millions of doses were shipped to states but are sitting unused.”
(Joe Walsh. “U.S. Has No Covid-19 Vaccine Reserve Despite Trump Administration’s Claims, Report Says.” Forbes. January 15, 2021.)
On January 12, the Trump administration announced that it was going to release the supply of COVID-19 vaccine doses it was holding in reserve to be used as second shots, days after President-elect Joe Biden announced his plan to do the same.
But there is no reserve anymore, the Washington Post reported Friday: The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed in charge of vaccine production had already begun shipping out that stockpile of second doses since the end of December.
So, the Trump administration's announcement on Tuesday was simply bullshit.
This is the latest, but not the first scandalous action of the Trump's administration's handling of the vaccine rollout.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Operation Warp Speed leaders waited two months to move forward on a CDC plan to start helping states prepare for the mass vaccination campaign. The CDC had wanted to start helping states plan in June how to get people vaccinated.
But officials at Operation Warp Speed rebuffed the agency’s plan for distributing vaccines. They adopted a similar plan in August only after exploring other options – and then held the release of the CDC’s playbook for states for two weeks for additional clearance and to put it out with another document, the officials said.
(Betsy McKay, Rebecca Ballhaus and Stephanie Armour. “Covid-19 Vaccine Leaders Waited Months to Approve Distribution Plans.” The Wall Street Journal. January 15, 2021.)
Chas Danner of nymag.com reports …
“Operation Warp Speed leaders apparently made the shift after becoming more confident about the vaccine supply chain, believing that they would be able to rely on the two vaccine manufacturers to supply the second doses states needed as booster shots directly off the factory line, negating the need for a federally withheld stockpile.
“To be clear, it appears that states will still be able to get the second doses they need moving forward, but they have not, and will not, be getting additional doses of the vaccine as the Trump administration indicated they would …
“And as the Washington Post report highlights, the omission is particularly galling since Azar and CDC director Robert Redfield also announced and promoted a new federal guidance greatly expanding who should be eligible to receive the vaccine first:
“[Azar] did not say the original policy had already been phased out, or that the stockpile had been exhausted. Signaling to states that they would soon see expanded supply, he also urged them to begin vaccinating adults 65 and older and those under 64 with a high-risk medical condition. Officials in some states embraced that directive, while others said suddenly putting hundreds of thousands of additional people at the front of the line would overwhelm their capacity."
(Chas Danner. “Vaccine Reserves the White House Released This Week Don’t Exist.” Intelligencer. nymag.com. January 15, 2021.)
Alex Azar told NBC News on Friday, January 16 …
“We now have enough confidence that our ongoing production will be quality and available to provide the second dose for people. So we’re not sitting on a reserve anymore. We’ve made that available to the states to order.”
Mismanagement, political posturing, delaying, and lies, lies, lies – from the beginning, Trump did not take the steps necessary to control the pandemic. In fact, even before Covid-19, Trump and his administration undermined preparedness – eliminating a White House office set up by the previous administration to combat pandemics, making cuts across other key parts of the federal government, and proposing further cuts.
After an outbreak spiraled out of control in New York, the U.S. suffered a wave of huge cases over the summer that other developed nations generally avoided, leading to new and continued surges in both cases and deaths. During this early spike, Trump chose to tell the nation that COVID-19 would soon “disappear.”
And as record cases and deaths continued, Trump chose to downplay the severity of the virus. He undermined the advice of experts, including those in his administration. He told states to “liberate” their economies over health orders. Refusing to be a role model, he refused for months to wear a mask in public. Trump and his administration stopped daily press briefings to inform the public of news about the pandemic. And, lately, Trump has quit the fight against the virus altogether.
German Lopez, senior correspondent at Vox, reported that the Trump administration actively abdicated control of issues to local, state, and private actors.
“There was a failure to realize what an efficiently spreading respiratory virus for which we have no vaccine and no antiviral meant,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Lopez. “From the very beginning, that minimization … set a tone that reverberated from the highest levels of government to what the average person believes about the virus.”
(German Lopez. Vox. “How Trump let Covid-19 win.” Vox. September 22, 2020.)
On January 15, 2021, U.S. President-elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr. announced his incoming administration’s proposal for a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 rescue plan, including $20 billion to mount a national vaccination program.
God bless those who suffer from the pandemic. God bless our brave and loyal first responders. And, God bless America as it struggles through the failed efforts of an autocratic, narcissistic leader who has inflicted permanent damage on the institutions of our democracy.
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