On the menu today: Ten emerging — or are they lingering? — problems with the vaccine rollout, a farewell to George Schultz, and 31 NFL teams are looking at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and trying to figure out how they just accomplished what once seemed extremely improbable.
Ten Emerging Problems in the Vaccination Race
You can almost hear the sigh of frustration from the Oval Office: “But I thought we had a plan.”
You may recall the old saying, “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” This is the 57th day of vaccinations in the United States — eight weeks, close to two months. The Biden team has been on the job for 20 days.
The good news is the effort to vaccinate Americans is gathering a bit of momentum. According to Bloomberg’s chart, the average is up to 1.46 million shots per day, meaning the “100 million shots in 100 days” threshold set by the Biden administration should be easily cleared.
The bad news is . . . well just about everything else: The pace is still slow, the CDC still can’t track the doses once they get to the states, doses are going to waste, some people who can get appointments aren’t showing up for them, while others can’t get appointments or are told to wait months. The system to get appointments in most states is maddening, with websites crashing, phone lines jammed, and appointments few and far between.
Here’s a rundown of ten problems that have emerged in the past few days.
One: State governments are expanding who is eligible to receive the vaccine, while those on the ground are arguing that their supplies are limited and that vaccinations should be limited to priority groups. Apparently, no one is all that certain that those second doses will be arriving in time after all:
While the state has said anyone 65 and over can get vaccinated, until Friday Southern California’s Riverside County was only serving people 80 and over at the sites it operates. In Los Angeles County, home to 10 million residents, starting next Tuesday the five mass vaccination sites it runs will only give second doses . . . In the San Francisco Bay Area, Napa County stopped giving first doses to preserve its remaining supply for those who are ready for second shots.
Two: People aren’t showing up for their appointments — in some stupefying circumstances, lots of people are bailing.
In New York City, the vaccination effort on Saturday apparently went terribly wrong:
The city’s 15 vaccination hubs were ghost towns last Saturday, and the city Department of Health is refusing to reveal just how bad distribution went.
One DOH staffer stationed at the Hillcrest High School hub in Queens on Jan. 30 said he did nothing all day.
“You cannot imagine how much nothing it was,” he said of the demoralizing day.
He said there were about 70 workers on hand — some earning overtime pay for 12-hour shifts — and about 10 people to vaccinate.
The worker said several appeals were made to DOH officials to be able to vaccinate people without appointments, and they were denied. He said the hubs had about 400 to 700 doses.
“We could have used that day to vaccinate thousands of people … and we just blew it,” he said.
Three: Doses are getting wasted.
Yesterday’s New York Times lead editorial began with an anecdote of “Katherine,” a nurse vaccinating nursing-home staff members and residents against the coronavirus, realizing that “roughly 15 to 20 vaccines were being thrown away at the end of each vaccination session. That’s because the number of doses that she and her co-workers had prepared — per the protocol established by Katherine’s manager at CVS, the pharmacy she works for — exceeded the number of people who showed up to be inoculated, often significantly.”
Four: Some vaccination sites are making efforts to ensure doses don’t go to waste, which is good news, but this means luck, and/or the willingness to hang around a vaccination site at the end of the day, is becoming a key factor in who gets vaccinated:
Scheduling issues, according the City of Tucson and Pima County, prevented the TCC from vaccinating the 1,500 people a day it is capable of doing. Only a few hundred law enforcement and educators have signed up there. This caused the county to reach out to qualified organizations in order to send their staff to fill up available slots, the release stated.
At the end of the day, the site has had some leftover doses. To avoid throwing away vaccines, the county ended up vaccinating some people who “had learned from Social Media that they could hang around the TCC late in the day,” according to the release. This has varied from a few dozen people per day to none all.
Five: Big chains such as CVS obviously reach a lot of communities, but not all of them, and independent pharmacies argue they are better-positioned to reach more distant communities.
For example, Goochland Pharmacy, located at Goochland Courthouse, has been receiving 30 to 40 calls a day from its regular customers, but owner Pete Taylor said the health department hasn’t told him when his store will receive vaccine to administer in an area that does not include CVS stores.
“People want to know when they can get it,” Taylor said. “All we can do is refer them to the health department.”
VDH spokeswoman Cheryle Rodriguez said CVS’ locations give it “the greatest ability to reach the largest number of persons, including those 65 years and older and those with the greatest risk for severe illness or death due to COVID-19.”
Six: Nursing home and home health-care companies are facing the problem of a customer base that demands caregivers be vaccinated, and caregivers that don’t want to take the vaccine yet.
Seven: The prioritization criteria used by certain states doesn’t make much sense to the people facing long waits. Hawaii is vaccinating government workers in their 20s, while telling those over age 65 that they hope to get to them by March.
Eight: Even the good news we have may be not quite as accurate as promised. Florida’s state government says 100 percent of the state’s assisted-living facilities have been contacted and offered the vaccine; only 90 percent self-report being contacted and giving the opportunity.
Nine: States are understandably protective of their own supplies. Up in Rhode Island, the CVS appointment-scheduling website is directing users to CVS locations in Connecticut.
Ten: The CDC’s much-criticized VAMS — vaccine administration-management system — was built by Deloitte on a no-bid contract, and now an immunization expert who had offered the government her own mass vaccination tracker at a lower price than Deloitte’s is accusing the company and the CDC of stealing her intellectual property.
The vaccination is a human endeavor, and human beings make mistakes. But this is still pretty disappointing, and a far cry from the ready-from-Day-One, we-have-a-plan, we’re-going-to-shut-down-the-virus rhetoric from our new president and his team for the past year.
Give the Biden administration a dollop of credit for recognizing the inherent ludicrousness of a public campaign to encourage vaccination when supplies are low and the wait for an appointment is measured in months:
Much of an envisioned $1 billion public awareness campaign remains on hold, with health officials figuring it makes little sense to make their pitch when so few Americans can get vaccinated. The U.S. is not expected to make vaccines widely available to the public until the spring.
R.I.P., George Schultz
Rest in peace, former secretary of state George Schultz. I only had the chance to hear him speak once, back in 2008, when I was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. I can’t remember his exact words, but he told a story about the then-soon-to-be-retracted deployment of missile-defense systems in Poland. The Russian government complained that the U.S. putting the systems in Poland meant they were a NATO effort to counter its military advantage. The Bush administration insisted the deployment was meant to deter any ballistic-missile attack from Iran, not Russia. The Polish government apparently piped up, “Wait, don’t tell us who these are supposed to deter! This is absolutely designed to counter a Russian military advantage!”
The editors remember Schultz’s contributions to American foreign policy here.
ADDENDA: Every NFL team is filled with well-paid general managers, coaches, assistants, trainers, and scouts all competing to build the best possible team. Vast numbers of these men, many with decades of experience in the game, study and examine the tape of every draft recruit like it’s the Zapruder film . . . and yet somehow, in 1999, Tom Brady lasted until the 199th pick.
Contemplate what has happened in the past year: The New England Patriots, having enjoyed as stellar a two-decade run as any team has ever enjoyed in any sport, let Brady go and he signs with Tampa Bay, a team that turned in a thoroughly “bleh” 7–9 record the previous year. And then Brady, along with his flaky tight end who might just be a financial genius, have no regular offseason preparation and no preseason games because of the pandemic. Add a head-case wide receiver who nearly played himself out of the league and a running back who was let go by Jacksonville . . . and somehow they not only make the playoffs, but they cut through the rest of the league like a hot knife through butter, while holding arguably the best and fastest offense since the St. Louis Rams’ “Greatest Show on Turf” to field goals. Whatever you expected in this football season, it probably wasn’t that.