“This is the quote from Mike Tyson: ‘Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the mouth,'” said one person with knowledge of the vaccine attempt who was not authorized to discuss the work. “They are capable. It’s just the weight of everything if you sit in that chair. It’s heavy.”
Biden officials leading the coronavirus response this week launched a series of regular briefings to keep the public informed of the state of the pandemic and the government’s efforts to contain it and as many Americans as possible in te ent.
However, the information is brief. And behind the scenes, officials say, the team has still struggled to deal with basic information, connect with the careers of government workers leading the response and devise a long-term strategy to bring the virus – and then keep it – under control .
“One of the virtues of a well-managed transition is that you have a degree of confidence in the career people you work for,” said the person familiar with the government’s work. The “courtship was unnaturally short,” the person added.
“Nobody had a complete picture,” said Julie Morita, a member of the Biden Transition Team and executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “The plans that were made were made with the assumption. that more information would be available and revealed as soon as they entered the White House. ”
This is a major challenge that Biden officials said they would expect for weeks, amid a rocky transition period that has left them scrambling to put together vaccine distribution plans and coordinate with state health officials.
Yet in the days since its adoption, the Covid response team has faced a situation that officials have described as worse than expected – and this has led to public reviews so astonishing that some of them in the former government transition team worked, surprised.
On Tuesday, Biden warned that the “vaccine program is in worse shape than we expected or expected”, reflecting complaints from its chief of staff, Ron Klain, that a ‘plan does not really exist’.
Biden’s Covid response team has since made a concerted effort not to blame the Trump administration, one official said – even though their vague allusions to a worse-than-expected situation have sparked speculation about what specific problems they have experienced.
But people with knowledge of the reaction have discussed new concerns that focus primarily on the federal government’s vaccine supply. Biden’s team is still gaining a thorough understanding of the location of more than 20 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine that the federal government purchased and distributed to states but has not yet been administered as patients.
Only a small percentage of those who do not contain doses – about two million, two officials said – are due to the backlog in reporting, the Biden team believes. This would mean keeping the rest of the important supply in warehouses, sitting idle in freezers or floating elsewhere in the complex distribution pipeline that stretches from government to individual states.
This is a dilemma that preceded the Biden team’s arrival, and Biden hammered the first week’s explosion of the vaccine under the Trump administration as a ‘gloomy failure’.
Yet the response team initially underestimated how difficult it would be to rectify.
The Biden crossing only brought to light on January 20 the proliferation effort leading up to the inauguration, a transitional official said, and was largely kept out of detailed discussions about the site industry. Until the last days of the transition, the team did not have access to Tiberius – the central government system used to distribute vaccines.
Only after Biden was sworn in did the Covid response team discover that the system was blinded for much of the route that vaccines move from the government’s distribution buttons to people’s arms.
Once the vaccines have been delivered to the states, the state’s individual public health systems are responsible for detecting them. The administration will only receive an update as soon as the doses have actually been administered and an official record has been submitted.
“I think they were really caught off guard,” said one adviser. “It’s a mess.”
Top officials in Biden stressed that the missing doses were spread across the states, largely responsible for getting them to the health care providers charged with vaccinating the tens of millions of people waiting in line for shots.
But the Covid team has since had to spend hours on the phone with various government officials trying to manually locate the unused doses, a time-consuming task that has depleted resources and has yet to give officials a complete picture of exactly where to go. the stock does not go.
They also tried to persuade healthcare providers to stop keeping doses in their reserve, a practice out of concern that people would not be able to get the second chance of their two-dose regimen – but one that is no longer needed and that only contributed. to confusion, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson warned White House officials on Tuesday that some states were to blame for the uneven deployment due to the reserves – a nuance not reflected in federal numbers, according to calls from the call. acquired by POLITICO.
The complaint led to a promise from the director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, to provide clearer guidance on how states should manage their assigned vaccines.
Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker later blamed a Trump administration program that designated pharmacies to distribute vaccines to long-term care facilities because they “lower our numbers” because it was slow to get shots in the arms.
The White House has since given states permission to use unused doses of the pharmacy program and allocate them elsewhere.
“There’s no doubt they’re doing a better job,” George Helmy, the chief of staff of Democratic Gov. New Jersey Phil Philphy, said of the government in Biden. “We have a real partner who is transparent and cooperates.”
As they grapple with the immediate distribution issues, federal officials have also rushed to come up with detailed plans to eventually distribute the shots to wider populations outside of health care workers and older Americans – a project that people familiar with the effort say the Trump government never even started to.
And while the Biden team eventually planned to increase the pace of vaccine production, some Biden officials said they were shocked to learn shortly after the Inauguration Day that there was little in the federal vaccine reserve – and that the businesses that the shots manufactured were nowhere near waxed. able to spread as many doses as the Trump administration has predicted in previous months.
The Biden administration has since warned that stocks will be limited until the summer, which increases the possibility of continued shortages, even as the country’s daily vaccination rate increases.
The White House on Friday hailed promising data on a new single-dose vaccine from Johnson & Johnson. But production barriers dampened expectations for its immediate impact, with one federal official comparing the expected early flow of shots to a “drop.”
This changed the first days of the Covid team into something closer to a triage operation than the more orderly implementation the administration had hoped for, especially since much of the federal health department works on a skeletal staff consisting of career officials and a handful of early political appointments.
And while the Biden administration is still building the mass vaccination sites and the long-awaited preparations for the long-term response effort, officials said the lost time navigating this early series of problems is likely to return a response that is likely to Biden’s will consume. first year in office.
“It’s not over soon,” said Craig Fugate, a former Obama FEMA administrator who worked on the transition. “There may not be a bright red line where when we’re done, we’m done and everything’s going to be fine.”
Rachel Roubein contributed to this report.