- Billionaire investor Bill Ackman tweeted on Tuesday to defeat logistical failures in the U.S. vaccine blast.
- “If Elon Musk can deliver 500,000 Teslas and Jeff Bezos can deliver at the same hour, we can vaccinate every American,” he tweeted.
- As of January 4, the U.S. has vaccinated less than five million people.
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Billionaire investor Bill Ackman has tweeted criticism of the US launch of the COVID-19 vaccine. He calls it a “failure of logistics and mismanagement during the transition” in a series of tweets on 5 January.
—Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) 5 January 2021
Ackman, chief executive of hedge fund Pershing Square, criticized the long-running explosion of vaccines as cases continued to rise. The pandemic continues to break records, with average daily cases exceeding 275,000, and more than 350,000 people in the U.S. are now dead from COVID-19, according to The COVID Tracking Project.
A record 3,900 people died on Dec. 30. Vaccinations have been chaotic so far because health departments do not have staff or expertise to administer the vaccine and get doses in the right places and as of January 4, less than 5 million people in the U.S. have been vaccinated. .
In a follow-up tweet, Ackman said there was no logistical excuse to underestimate the vaccinations.
“If Elon Musk can deliver 500,000 Teslas and Jeff Bezos can deliver at the same hour, we can vaccinate every American. The time is now!” he wrote, referring to the CEOs of Tesla and Amazon.
—Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) 5 January 2021
In a follow-up tweet, Ackman said the mismanagement of the vaccine “looks like a genocide” on the elderly.
“We’re killing the biggest generation … If the virus were mostly killing children rather than the elderly, would we sit back and allow that to happen?” he wrote, referring to ageism.
Pershing Square did not respond to Business Insider’s request for further comment on Ackman’s tweets.
Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz on Sunday that vaccinations could speed up soon. He said the US could vaccinate one million people every day.
Ackman’s Pershing Square fund achieved a 70% return in 2020, much of which was realized by the firm’s expectation of the devastating effects of the pandemic on business early in the year through credit crunch.