Dr. Jha explains why the vaccines aren’t being rolled out quickly, as if we didn't already know

I posted on New Year’s Day about the fact that – surprise, surprise! – the Trump administration is bungling the rollout of the new Pfizer Covid vaccine, even though the vaccine itself was developed, tested and approved in record time. I speculated about the reasons for this, but in this morning’s WaPo, Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University provided a much more authoritative take in a Perspective titled “Vaccination is going slowly because nobody is in charge”.

The subtitle of the article is “We’ve known for months that vaccines were coming. Why weren’t we prepared to use them?” And that pretty well sums up the whole article: The wonderful Trump administration “planners” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) never considered it their responsibility to take any thought to how, once they’d rushed the vaccines to the states, the states would deliver them into people’s arms.

And of course, they never seem to have considered that the $340 million provided to the states to prepare for vaccine delivery in April wouldn’t actually be enough to get it into those arms, even though the states have been saying that for months. It was only two weeks ago that Congress approved $9 billion for the states to use for this purpose, and as you probably remember, Trump held up that bill for another four or five days. Just those days of delay will without much doubt lead to hundreds of additional unnecessary deaths, on top of the thousands of unnecessary Covid deaths we’re now experiencing daily.

He also helpfully points out that the vaccine doesn’t do any good unless it’s injected in people’s arms; it won’t save any lives if it sits in boxes. But here he misses an important point: Sure, the administration understood this was required, but they were narrowly focused on the idea of delivering the vaccine before the election – a goal they almost achieved. This is almost without a doubt the reason why they never even considered whether the vaccine could be delivered to actual people with the speed required to save lives; that was something they could think about if Trump won, and it wasn’t something they cared about if Trump lost (of course, the fact that Trump has done literally nothing to help the coronavirus response since his election – and a lot to hinder it – shows that saving lives was never anything he cared about).

Of course, Dr. Jha ends the op-ed with a hopeful note about what President Biden can do to improve the situation. What’s amazing is that he doesn’t even bother to raise the cry that Trump should do something now (or for that matter, that the Republicans should be pressing him to do this). Without much doubt, thousands of lives could be saved if Trump changed course immediately and did everything he could to save lives, rather than destroy them. But that won’t happen. We know that. Sad. 

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.