The pace of vaccinations will probably increase bit by bit in the coming weeks, but you can do the math.
Over in The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum compares the current system of getting a vaccine to waiting in a long line for cabbage in the Soviet Union.
You all might be living in 21st-century America, but those of us who reside in this new version of Moscow, circa 1975, have to scoff at quasi-optimism. Beat COVID-19? With a bunch of dysfunctional Safeway websites? With dozens of different institutions, each one requiring different forms and a different registration?
Signs that we live in a dying superpower are all around us. Officials seem to make illogical, chaotic decisions; and everything is much more complicated than it needs to be. Could no one have invented an app or a website that assigns people to doses and vaccination sites in order of priority? Is it impossible for Maryland to dump Safeway, take direct control of the process, and order its National Guard to give out the vaccine at schools? How about letting the very oldest people get their shots first—as more orderly countries have done—before opening up the system to a million others?
According to Bloomberg’s latest numbers, the U.S. has administered 36.6 million shots, or 63.8 percent of the available supply. That means that roughly 57.4 million shots have been manufactured and distributed, and 21 million are sitting around, waiting to be used, or they’re “lost,” stuck somewhere in the part of the supply chain after the states receive them.
For months, Operation Warp Speed (OWS) talked about the importance of tracking the supply at every step. Army general Gustav Perna, the head of logistics for OWS, said back in October, “We need to know where every vial was, whether it was in the factory, or it was on a truck, or it had been distributed down to an administration site; we must have 100 percent accountability of all vaccines every day.” Every box of vaccines that is shipped is “equipped with a GPS beacon, a temperature monitor and a barcode that’s scanned upon receipt,” and the Army Medical Logistics Command offered extensive information about every step of storage and transport.
Using Tiberius, Operation Warp Speed knows exactly how many vaccines have been shipped to states. Certain state governments contend that the Tiberius system is slowing down their ability to get vaccinations into arms.
Unsurprisingly, part of the problem stems from the federal government spending $44 million on software from Deloitte that apparently no one likes using:
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s supposedly simple system, called the Vaccine Administration Management System, or VAMS, has emerged as yet another pain point in the nation’s chaotic public health campaign. Reporting by Bloomberg News and MIT Technology Review shows that some of the people tasked with administering vaccines don’t like VAMS. As of Jan. 28, 41 states weren’t using the tool: One of South Carolina’s top health officials had described VAMS as a “cuss word,” according to MIT Technology Review.
“It is a clunky system. Nobody likes it. The hospitals don’t like it, the providers don’t like it, the users don’t like it, DHEC doesn’t like it,” Marshall Taylor, acting director of South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control, told state lawmakers last month, according to the Island Packet. “This is not a good system.”
(A federal-government website designed for obtaining needed health care is needlessly complicated, isn’t user-friendly, and isn’t working as advertised, after Washington sent millions to a contractor? It feels like 2013 again!)
That said, any software system is only as good as the data that someone is putting into it. Last night, Politico painted an unflattering picture of how the inventory is being tracked and recorded at the ground level:
. . . it’s also clear that the coronavirus vaccine tracking system is barely a system. Sometimes hospital workers enter the vaccination in a patient’s electronic medical record — without understanding that it doesn’t connect to the state vaccine registry. Sometimes second doses are double-counted. Sometimes a vaccine distribution site “batches” the data, meaning they do it every few days, not in real time, so it looks like there are more discrepancies. Some reports are “delayed or missing,” the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers executive director Mike Fraser acknowledged in a press call today.
A lot of people on the left will throw up their hands and fume that “Donald Trump screwed it up” — as if Trump himself evaluated and weighed in on the software systems. Or they may choose to blame it on “red-state governors.” The states that have used the smallest percentages of their allocated supply are Alabama, Kansas, Idaho, Massachusetts, Alaska, Mississippi, D.C., Pennsylvania, Illinois, and New Hampshire — six GOP governors, four Democrats, if you count Washington D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser.
As laid out earlier this week, a big reason why people will be waiting a long time to get the vaccine is that right now, at least 100 million Americans want the vaccine and only 10 million doses are arriving per week, and only 9 million or so doses are being administered per week. The pace of vaccinations will probably increase bit by bit in the coming weeks, but you can do the math. It’s just going to take time — months, not weeks — to work through the elderly and those with other health issues.
Applebaum might not be much happier if, for the past few months, federal, state, and local officials had emphasized that vaccination appointments for those in higher-risk categories might stretch well into late spring. But she would at least be less surprised. President Trump was infamous for overpromising and underdelivering, but Joe Biden’s simplistic boast, “I’m not going to shut down the country, I’m going to shut down the virus” isn’t as different as his fans would like to believe.
And as many of my colleagues have noted, the private sector researched, discovered, developed, and manufactured the vaccine. It is the federal, state, county, and local governments that are distributing it — and infuriating and confusing so many Americans in the process.