[ "We should have been prepared to start inoculating millions of
people the day a vaccine was approved. This is a massive policy
failure."] [[link removed]]

'THIS IS WARP SPEED?' AT CURRENT PACE, US WILL TAKE 10 YEARS TO
ADEQUATELY VACCINATE THE PUBLIC AGAINST COVID-19, ANALYSIS WARNS  
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Jake Johnson
December 30, 2020
Common Dreams
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_ "We should have been prepared to start inoculating millions of
people the day a vaccine was approved. This is a massive policy
failure." _

A woman walks past a "Covid-19 vaccine not yet available" sign
outside a store in Arlington, Virginia on December 1, 2020., (Photo:
Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

 

If the Trump administration's coronavirus vaccine distribution effort
continues at its current sluggish pace, it would take nearly a decade
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the United States to inoculate an adequate number of Americans to rein
in the deadly pandemic.

That's according to an analysis
[[link removed]] released
Tuesday by _NBC News_, which found that the U.S. is nowhere near on
track to meet the Trump administration's stated goal of vaccinating
around 80% of the population by late June of 2021.

"To meet that goal, a little more than three million people would have
to get the shots each day," _NBC _noted. "But so far, only about two
million people—most of them frontline healthcare workers and some
nursing home residents—have gotten their first shots of the 11.5
million doses that were delivered in the last two weeks."

President-elect Joe Biden took aim at the Trump administration's slow
and chaotic
[[link removed]] vaccine
rollout in a speech
[[link removed]] Tuesday,
declaring that the "plan to distribute vaccines is falling behind, far
behind." Warning it will "take years, not months, to vaccinate the
American people" if significant changes aren't made, Biden promised "a
much more aggressive effort, with more federal involvement and
leadership, to get things back on track."

"We'll find ways to boost the pace of vaccinations," said Biden, who
vowed to invoke the Defense Production Act to speed up the manufacture
of necessary materials.

In response to Biden's remarks, outgoing President Donald Trump
characteristically refused to take responsibility for the lagging
distribution effort, instead placing the blame on crisis-ravaged
states.

"It is up to the states to distribute the vaccines once brought to the
designated areas by the federal government," Trump tweeted
[[link removed]]. "We
have not only developed the vaccines, including putting up money to
move the process along quickly, but gotten them to the states."

While there is plenty of evidence
[[link removed]] indicating
that state officials are moving too slowly—Texas' health
commissioner, for instance, warned
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week that a "significant portion" of the state's vaccine supply is
sitting on shelves—critics have argued that the Trump administration
failed to lay the groundwork for a speedy and effective distribution
effort, effectively guaranteeing that states would struggle getting
vaccine doses out the door.

"This is warp speed?" Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for
Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), asked in a blog post
[[link removed]] Monday,
pointing to the relatively small number
[[link removed]] of
people in the U.S. who have received shots since the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) authorized the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for
emergency use earlier this month.

"We should have had major warehouses located around the country so
that as soon as the FDA green-lighted a vaccine, it could quickly be
delivered to hospitals and clinics in every corner of the country,"
Baker argued. "We should have been prepared to start inoculating
millions of people the day a vaccine was approved. This is a massive
policy failure."

Ashish Jha, a physician and dean of the Brown University School of
Public Health, echoed Baker's criticism of the Trump administration in
a series of tweets on Monday.

"The worst part is no real planning on what happens when vaccines
arrive in states. No plan, no money, just hope that states will figure
this out," Jha wrote. "[State health departments] are trying to stand
up a vaccination infrastructure. Congress had given them no money.
States are out of money, so many are passing it on to hospitals,
nursing homes."

"Public health has always been a state/federal partnership," Jha
added. "States are stretched. Feds are supposed to help. But the same
folks who blamed states for the testing mess now ready to blame states
for the vaccine slowdown. They are again setting states up to fail."

Growing fears about the lagging pace of vaccinations come as Colorado
on Tuesday reported the first U.S. case of a more contagious
coronavirus variant that was first detected in the United Kingdom.
Experts said it is possible that the variant has spread in the
Colorado patient's community and possibly elsewhere in the U.S., which
has the highest Covid-19 death toll in the world.

As the _New York Times_ reported
[[link removed]],
"Scientists are worried about variants but not surprised by them. It
is normal for viruses to mutate, and most of the mutations of the
coronavirus have proved minor. There's no evidence that an infection
with the variant—known as B.1.1.7—is more likely to lead to a
severe case of Covid-19, increase the risk of death or evade the new
vaccines."

"But the speed at which the variant seems to spread,"
the _Times_ added, "could lead to more infections—and therefore
more hospitalizations," heightening the urgency of the vaccine
rollout.

Leana Wen, visiting professor of health policy and management at the
George Washington University's Milken School of Public Health, wrote
in a column
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the _Washington Post_ on Tuesday that the speed of vaccinations thus
far "should set off alarms."

"Remember, the first group of vaccinations was supposed to be the
easiest: It's hospitals and nursing homes inoculating their own
workers and residents," Wen wrote. "If we can't get this right, it
doesn't bode well for the rest of the country."

Wen proceeded to take the Trump administration to task for repeatedly
shifting the goal posts as it failed to meet its initial targets for
the mass inoculation campaign.

"When states learned
[[link removed]] they
would receive fewer doses than they had been told, the
administration said
[[link removed]] its
end-of-year goal was not for vaccinations but vaccine distribution,"
Wen noted. "It also halved the number of doses that would be available
to people, from 40 million to 20 million. (Perhaps they hoped no one
would notice that their initial pledge was to vaccinate 20 million
people, which is 40 million doses, or that President Trump had at one
point vowed to have 100 million doses
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the end of the year.)"

"Instead of muddying the waters, the federal government needs to take
three urgent steps. First, set up a real-time public dashboard to
track vaccine distribution," Wen wrote. "Second, publicize the plan
for how vaccination will scale up so dramatically... Third,
acknowledge the challenges and end the defensiveness. The public will
understand if initial goals need to be revised, but there must be
willingness to learn from missteps and immediately course-correct."

_JAKE JOHNSON [[link removed]] is a
staff writer for Common Dreams. Follow him on Twitter: @johnsonjakep
[[link removed]]_

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