Hospitals and other healthcare facilities, already overwhelmed by Covid patients, do not have the staff to administer vaccines, while plans to set up vaccination stations elsewhere, such as inside pharmacies, have not gotten off the ground.Īs with most healthcare questions in America, no one is sure what health insurance will pay for or how much it will cost. In other areas, excess doses have led to public calls for willing patients, and in some cases patient no-shows have caused doses to be spoiled and thrown out. “I think that was a really unfortunate step, it certainly did not match up with reality, and I think what we’ll be seeing is that state and local health departments are going to continue to be the shock absorbers because they don’t have enough doses,” said Osterholm. The states of New York, Florida, California and others have witnessed a crush of demand, interminable waits in queues or on the phone and online, growing frustration among residents and zero available appointments in many places. There aren’t nearly enough doses yet to vaccinate that many people, and no expert ever thought there would be at this stage – but the hastily altered guidelines have created a sense of false scarcity with the public. ![]() Each state has its own rules for who is eligible for vaccination, but those guidelines sometimes contradict federal guidelines, and the number of doses allotted to states by Washington in many cases does not line up with the number of supposedly “eligible” state residents.įueling the confusion was a sudden and unforeseen shift on Tuesday in Trump administration guidelines that exponentially grew the pool of eligible vaccine recipients from healthcare workers and long-term care facility residents – about 24 million people total – to include anyone 65 and older, plus non-healthcare essential workers and young people with pre-existing conditions – about 180 million people. “And they get an understanding of where they are in line.”įor now, people are confused. ![]() “One of the things that is really needed, I think, right off the bat, is a communications approach such that everybody understands what is going on, what the expectations are,” said Koff. President-elect Joe Biden receives the second dose of a Covid-19 vaccination in Newark, Delaware, earlier this month. In a speech in Delaware on Friday, Biden filled in some details of his plan, saying his administration would build vaccine stockpiles, open new vaccination sites and hire more staff while answering Americans’ basic questions about what is in the shots. In recent public statements, the Biden team members have described a forward focus on the who, where and why: who gets the shots, where the shots happen and explaining why – for hesitant patients – vaccination is vital. The vacuum of planning for vaccine distribution before Biden takes office appears to have been so vast that the challenges ahead are basic. The United States has witnessed “an incredible technology miracle to bring these vaccines through,” Osterholm said, but “an incredible communication and rollout strategy failure”. ![]() Operation Warp Speed was the name given to the Trump administration’s vaccine development program. “What Operation Warp Speed did is, they did all this work and spent many billions of dollars to get vaccines to manufacturing status and approval, and then said, ‘Oh, the rest of it will just happen’,” said Michael Osterholm, a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, in his podcast as director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. ![]() So the United States is firmly on course to produce more than enough coronavirus vaccine to immunize the population in a time frame that one year ago many would have thought impossible.īut as Biden prepares to assume the presidency on Wednesday, and his team prepares to radically expand the national vaccination project, officials warn that a failure on the part of the Donald Trump administration to plan adequately for the distribution and administration of vaccine doses threatens to squander the advantage gained from quick vaccine development.īiden advisers also warn that as fast as vaccine development is moving, the virus is also accelerating, with at least three variants taking hold worldwide, and the looming prospect in the US of such an explosion of coronavirus cases that no vaccine administration program could keep pace.
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