It is not surprising that Trump’s deployment of the COVID vaccine is an extreme failure

For some mysterious reason, people are shocked – shocked! – that the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in the USA has been observed.

And screwed it up. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 11.4 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were distributed on Monday. But only 2.1 million people have been vaccinated.

By the administration’s own standards, this is a major failure. On December 10, Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, promised that 20 million Americans would be vaccinated in the next few weeks.

President Trump

Since it will last three weeks this weekend, it is obviously not going to happen. The White House has moved the goalposts and promised that by the end of the year, 20 million doses would be distributed. Then he revised his promise at 20 million doses by the first week of January. Either way, the prospect of sticking to the self-imposed mark is dull.

Projecting the rate of actual vaccinations in the future yields a cruel conclusion.

Based on the judgment that 80% of Americans, or 264 million people, must be vaccinated for the nation to achieve herd immunity – that is, enough immunity that the virus cannot spread significantly, not even among the non- vaccinated – public health expert Leana Wen of George Washington University estimates that “at the current rate, it will take about ten years to reach the level of vaccination.”

Elected President Joe Biden spoke out about the decline. In a statement on Tuesday, he said the country would have to increase its vaccination rate five- or six-fold to achieve its own goal of fully vaccinating 50 million Americans (that is, with both doses of Pfizer and Modern vaccines with two shots)) in his first 100 days in office.

At the current rate, he said, “It will take years, not months, to vaccinate the American people.”

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It is pertinent to acknowledge that major public health projects such as mass vaccinations are difficult and can have wrong mistakes and disappointment in the early stages.

The launch, for example, of the government website for reporting the Affordable Health Care Health Plan from October 1, 2013, was a beacon in technology. But the Obama administration took action, and within a few weeks the site was up and running.

The Trump administration has had seven years to absorb lessons from the Obamacare debacle, but it does not appear to be. It blinded several states in mid-December by informing them that their allocation of the Pfizer vaccine, the first to be approved for widespread use, would be as much as 40% below initial expectation.

Government officials attributed the confusion to misunderstandings of the original promises, but for many governors, the statement did not hold water.

Genl. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of the government’s Operation Warp Speed ​​funding program for the vaccines and other anti-pandemic products, later acknowledged that the confusion was the result of “a planning error, and I am responsible.” ‘

At a news conference on Wednesday, Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed, acknowledged that the vaccination rate as part of the available doses was “lower than we had hoped.”

But Perna tried to put a happy glow on the plate at the same briefing. “Everyone should be very proud together,” he said. “It was a whole American approach.”

Yet many of the factors that slow down the rate of vaccinations are clear. This includes inadequate planning and the refusal of the administration to take on more of the task. The latter reflects Trump’s approach to the pandemic from the outset. The approach is concentrated to its core: “This is not our problem.”

Last Tuesday, Trump blamed any problems for state governments. “It is up to the States to distribute the vaccines that were once brought to the designated areas by the Federal Government,” did he tweet. “We not only developed the vaccines, including raising money to speed up the process, but also bringing them to the states. Biden failed with swine flu!”

But experts believe that leaving the vaccine administration to the states alone is not an answer at all. What was needed – and not coming – is federal coordination.

There is ‘no real planning on what happens when vaccines arrive in the state’, Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, tweeted this week. “No plan, no money, just hope states will figure it out.”

Jha noted that the state health departments are likely to inherit the task of vaccine management. Throughout the year, they struggle with the need to “manage all the tests, data analysis and reporting, give advice to businesses, schools, conduct public campaigns, and so on.” Now they will load vaccination on their plates.

Mass vaccination programs as required for COVID-19 are not unprecedented. The model often cited is a smallpox vaccination campaign carried out in New York City after an outbreak in 1947 was detected.

The city has set up vaccination stations in police areas, municipal buildings, community centers and ‘virtually every hospital in the city,’ Israel Weinstein, the city’s health commissioner, reported a few months later. Shots were given for free.

Mayor William O’Dwyer called for universal vaccination and received one himself, as well as President Harry Truman, who traveled to the city on purpose. The program has enjoyed some degree of cooperation between officials and the public, government support and the general belief in science that has been undermined today.

“In a period of less than a month, more than 6,350,000 people have been vaccinated,” Weinstein wrote, “more than 5,000,000 of them within the two-week period following the call for general vaccination by the mayor. “

In contrast, the roll-out of vaccines is handed over to pharmacies, whether local or parts of large chains such as Walgreens and CVS. But the retailers do not have the ability to coordinate local or regional vaccination programs, which means that everyone in a vaccination group, regardless of age, health condition or job description, can be found and encouraged to report their vaccination if it is his. or her turn.

Furthermore, the Trump White House has not utilized all the available capabilities for the manufacture and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines.

For example, despite restrictions on the supply of vaccines caused by limited manufacturing capacity, the government left the sole right to Moderna and Pfizer to contract with manufacturers – although federal law gives the government the right to ‘withdraw’ and to make its own manufacturing trade exactly in this situation.

Dark advice from the CDC on which groups should be given preference for vaccination during a period of limited stock has left states to formulate their policies themselves. Even in ideal circumstances, not every state can comply with CDC recommendations, but the situation is not helped by the Trump administration’s systematic destruction of the CDC’s reputation, which was once the gold standard for public health agencies.

Florida and Texas, for example, have begun firing on residents over the age of 65, moving “essential” workers – those who must regularly contact the public to perform their jobs – further back.

“The problem is that people will be 73, 74 at the back of the line for a young 21-year-old worker who is considered ‘essential,'” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said. does not make sense. ‘

According to an account, elderly residents in southwest Florida have been asked to report in person to the vaccination centers, where they wait for hours in maskless crowds.

There does not seem to be a system in place to enforce priority rules for vaccines, leading to the likelihood that people with low priority, but high appeal, will have to jump line. Moderna announced Tuesday that it will make the vaccine available to its “workers, contractors and board members” and adult members of their households “to reduce the risk of absence and disruption due to a COVID-19 infection.”

This is a good thing for workers. As for the board members, this privileged group of nine, in addition to Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, also includes three business leaders (two retired), an MIT professor and four businesses.

Other early recipients include White House staff, Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress and designated staff members. Under normal circumstances, this would make sense in the interest of continuing the government in a crisis.

‘It is, so to speak, a hard pill to swallow, when so many of the newly vaccinated legislators and other political leaders will be the ones who for most of the past year have rejected the seriousness of the pandemic and refuse to.’ set an example of responsible mask-wearing and social distance, and vote against aid for ordinary Americans facing death, illness, and economic hardship.

Pence, for example, blamed “the media” in June for promoting alarm over a second wave of COVID-19 infections, as the daily average new cases dropped to 20,000 from 30,000 in April and 25,000 in May. Average rates on new businesses currently stand at 194,500 per day. It happened on his watch as head of the White House Coronavirus task force, a job for which he was majestically poorly prepared.

President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have also been shot in public, but this is in line with their approach to the pandemic and their support for public health initiatives during the crisis.

It is possible, even probable, that the vaccine program only experiences birth pains. This is the opinion of Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, who writes that “this problem is likely to be resolved within the next few weeks and people will soon forget that it ever happened.”

He may be right. But if so, it’s likely to be because the program will be taken over by a new administration from January 20, one that has already begun assembling a pandemic task force of experienced experts in epidemiology and public health, without the psychophants and incompetents. which dominated in the Trump administration.

Biden at least knows that he is facing an elementary challenge, and so far he has not shown the tendency to avoid responsibility for it.

This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.