Operation Warp Speed promises to accelerate the development, manufacture and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
“It means big, and it means fast – a massive scientific, industrial and logistical effort,” President Trump announced at a news conference in May.
The administration has penetrated at a scientific level, breaking the record for bringing a vaccine to market and silencing critics who said it would take years.
But so far, the operation has failed in its other core mission: to get vaccines to the American public.
Despite months of preparation, the proliferation effort seems to be moving under bureaucracy. Sign-in hotlines and websites have expired. The big question is also evident from the long queues of elderly people who have camped at health clinics.
At the current rate, it will take the American public to vaccinate for years.
“There seems to have been a reasonable breakdown in the planning process,” said David Johnson, a Chicago health care consultant. “The facts were just focused on: ‘OK, we’re just going to bring the vaccines to your doorstep. ”
More than 17 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been sent to hospitals and pharmacies across the country, but according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 5 million were used Tuesday morning.
Federal health officials said in December they planned to vaccinate 20 million Americans before the new year.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading expert in infectious diseases, described the problems as a few mistakes.
“So we are not where we want to be, there is no doubt about that,” he said on Sunday. “But I think we can get there if we really accelerate.”
The shots are free, but the federal government has left it to government officials to decide how to distribute them.
When vaccines arrive at a distribution site, several factors must match. There should be enough freezer, syringes and health care workers to administer the vaccines. Most importantly, it should be checked that people are eligible and when and where they should show up for their injections, and this is where most of the interruptions have taken place.
In Houston, where the elderly and those aged 16 and older are eligible with chronic conditions, a hotline of the appointment crashed after 250,000 people called.
People were ordered to register in person at the vaccination clinic in the city on Saturday, after which they were told to call for appointments on Sunday.
“Vehicles lined up at the scene early Sunday morning, many without appointments,” said Scott Packard, a spokesman for the city’s health department. “We decided to serve the people who were in line with the remaining appointments instead of pointing them away.”
The city introduced online registration on Monday and announced shortly thereafter that no more appointments would be available until more vaccine arrived.
Meanwhile, the surrounding Harris County received 6,000 doses and sought to distribute them through provincial agencies to teachers and to those eligible for nursing homes, homeless shelters, and the prison in the country. But a registration link for the workers crashed after it was leaked on social media last week.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner promised Monday that he would set up a “big mega-site” for vaccinations by this Saturday.
In Lee County, Florida, shots were offered first-and-first serve. News reports have shown that elderly people with grass chairs are queuing at the district health department and waiting hours to see if they will make the cut.
In Tampa, the vaccine registration site in Hillsborough County crashed within minutes of being online Monday morning. The country now only takes telephone bookings.
Several other counties in Florida use Eventbrite, a website better known for selling concert tickets, to register vaccinations. Law enforcers warned this week about fake Eventbrite websites asking seniors for vaccinations that do not exist.
The registration of residents of old age homes for vaccination faces another challenge: under federal law, residents or their representatives must give informed consent for any treatment.
“We are seeing a lot of trouble,” said Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, a advocacy organization in New York. “It really had to be done months ago when we knew in advance that there would hopefully be a vaccine coming.”
He blamed federal officials for not letting long-term care managers know about the permit requirements.
According to the federal pharmacy partnership for long-term care program, 429,000 residents of long-term care institutions received initial doses of 3.3 million, the CDC reported Monday.
Meanwhile, government officials and hospitals in some cases are saving on accusations that unused doses are sitting in health systems.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted that “a significant portion of the vaccines distributed in Texas may be on hospital shelves as opposed to being given to vulnerable Texans.”
Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Hospital Assn.
In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo said hospitals that did not use their supplies within a week of receiving them would be removed from distribution networks and possibly fined $ 100,000.
“We want the vaccines in people’s arms,” he said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has also threatened to remove scheduled consignments from hospitals if they do not vaccinate faster. Hospitals said they needed more staff to administer the vaccines.
Indeed, many of the health systems responsible for distributing the vaccines are struggling to keep up with the unprecedented demand for both coronavirus testing and patient care amid a huge increase in infections, according to U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams.
Another possible reason for the bottleneck is that high-priority groups, such as hospital staff, were unexpectedly wary of the injections. A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29% of health workers hold ‘27% against hesitation, slightly more than the general population.
In California, for example, nearly 500 doses have been made available to health care workers in the St. Louis area. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Red Bluff in Tehama County. The hospital has since returned about 200 of them to the health department.
About 60 percent of Ohio nursing home workers chose to skip the vaccine. And in Washington, after some initial reactions missed their appointments, a pharmacist ticked off a law student buying groceries and offered him a dose to prevent it from going to waste – an emergency measure allowed under local health guidelines word.
The sluggish deployment provides bad forerunners for the hope of vaccinating a large number of people quickly and reaching herd immunity, which experts say is essential to prevent the virus.
Johnson, the health care consultant, said the situation reminded him of the launch of Obamacare, when the Affordable Care Act website threatened to derail the system. The HealthCare.gov website crashed just two hours after its launch in 2013 and was later able to handle only about 35,000 visitors at a time.
“How hard it is to design a website, and yet it’s the thing they’ve stamped their toes on,” Johnson said.
The debacle undermines confidence in the system and gives critics an opening – and the same could happen with the COVID-19 vaccine, he said.
“If we are not effective during the rollout, the encouragement to take the vaccine does not carry as much weight,” he said.
Baumgaertner and Kaleem reported from Los Angeles, Hennessy-Fiske from Houston and Read from Seattle.