I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from. Here’s a long piece about all the planning Biden’s team has been doing over the last few weeks (actually sounds like months) for a huge Federal vaccine response:
It’s not entirely complimentary, but it paints a much more aware picture than you do. For example:
Biden recently floated the idea of establishing thousands of federally run community vaccination centers “located in high school gyms or NFL football stadiums” with potential help from FEMA, the CDC, as well as the US military and the National Guard. The President-elect has also vowed to send in mobile units to vaccinate those in hard-to-reach communities, and use the Defense Production Act to speed up vaccine production.
One source close to Biden’s Covid task force and privy to the team’s planning said a number of different ideas to accomplish mass vaccination are being discussed, though those plans remain in flux.
It does sound like a worrying amount of confusion, but it seems unsupportable to say that they’re not aware of the issues or not focused on putting federal muscle behind stopping them.
Ok. How does that disprove my point that he hasn’t worked up a concrete plan that he can start implementing day 1? Floating ideas is great and all but that isn’t what I’m talking about. Dicking around for months after he gets in office before doing anything meaningful is going to cost a lot of lives.
Also I never said Biden and his team aren’t aware of the issues. I said they have no plan to address them as of today. At least not one they have publically discussed. That is true. If anything your article saying their plans are “in flux” is exactly what I am being critical of.
I did say I don’t think Biden “gets it” and what I meant by that is that he doesn’t get that this isn’t something he can workshop for a couple months after getting into office and then roll something out a few months from now. He should have spent the last two months doing that. The fact they publically admit they have no plan is exactly what I mean when I say he doesn’t get it.
I mean, vaccine supply is a problem too. If J&J comes back good in a few days, that’s a game changer. If not, we need to figure out how to force Moderna and Pfizer to scale up, because this shit isn’t getting it done.
As promised, I ignored updating my numbers through the holiday season.
The good–we at least diverged off the worst case Cuse asked me to project, right around Xmas. 28 day cfr is down in the 1.5% range.
The bad–The data is still wonky so I’m unsure how this will hold. Very likely that the case data is being impacted by testing limits. National positivity is in the mid-teens.
The ugly–its still a fuck ton of disease and death with no downturn in sight, maybe a plateau. Even a linear increase should get us to 7DRA 4k/day by early Feb.
It might take 3-4 months to develop the sort of plan you want. It sounds like the Trump administration has not been doing much in this direction and may be concealing information to make it harder for the Biden transition team, perhaps intentionally to make Biden look bad.
Biden’s aggravation is rooted in the rush to build the foundation for an extended inoculation effort, a complex undertaking that includes untangling all manner of bureaucratic obstacles — from staffing issues to technology problems and insurance coverage dilemmas — that the transition had expected to already be well underway, 11 people close to the transition told POLITICO.
So fire him and get a new Covid coordinator? Sounds like Biden agrees with me that things aren’t where they need to be in that article. There is also this gem:
“The vaccination effort has been further hampered by divisions within Biden’s own team, most recently over the decision to keep Gen. Gustave Perna in his role as chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed, the government’s vaccine accelerator.”
Biden is keeping the head of Trump’s vaccine push. What the fuck.
Look I get Biden is inheriting a mess. I get this is a complicated issue. I don’t expect him to be a miracle worker. But that Politico article should be a huge red flag. Half of it is devoted to infighting within Biden’s Covid team. Of course Biden wants to fix it which is a step up from Trump. All I’m saying is it isn’t clear at all they have made any progress actually formulating a concrete plan to get 10x more shots in arms anytime soon. That is what we need to accomplish to actually be meaningfully done with Covid by 2022.
I’m suggesting they might not have access to relevant information needed to formulate a good plan until the inauguration. How would you have them work around that constraint?
I’ve said it previously but I would have formed a task force with every governor/state willing to come to the table back in December. I would have listened to what the real world problems they are having on the ground are and had my experts formulate plans to solve them. They could have worked around Trump’s blockade that way.
I’m also not saying I have the answers for how to fix it. I’m saying the clock is ticking and speed matters with this issue. Every day that goes by with this nightmare of a vaccine rollout is literally costing people their lives. It does sound like they are working on a plan but the fact they don’t have one yet is worrying to me.
Actually, I think this attack is misguided too. The distribution disaster is the current kink in the pipeline, so it urgently needs to be fixed, but the last mile stuff is really not that hard. I mean, we had 60 million people vote in person on a single day last year. Giving someone a shot is not harder than registering their vote. You can have 25 guys roll up in a refrigerated truck to a public park, whip out some card tables and bam, you’ve got a vaccination center that can process 5-10k people a day. The distribution bottleneck is going to disappear as soon as there’s an administration that gives a shit, leaving production as the fundamental problem.
Yeah, I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll be experiencing a huge rampup in the next couple of months. Locally, Ohio State has announced that they’ll be using the Schottenstein Center for mass vaccinations starting next week, estimating 3k per day:
I’d like to think that any major university or arena could do the same thing.
