Raining A Wall Of COVID Deaths

January 1, 2021

First day of a brand-spanking new year, yet the dreadful shadow of 2020 will follow us for a long time,
Connecting rod between calendar time is COVID-19 with the nefarious antics of the T-Rump the linchpin grasping the two periods together.
One showcase aspect of this scenario is the T-Rump-Wall and the deaths from the T-Rump-virus.
Via the UK’s Independent this morning:

Republican anti-Trump group, the Lincoln Project, has released a new ad attacking the president’s handling of Covid-19, claiming his Mexico border wall is made from the tombstones of the more than 330,000 Americans who have died.

Horror of COVID will not subside even with the introduction of vaccines as the ability to get a mass of Americans immunized is a logistics nightmare going in, but with the T-Rump’s self-centered, incompetent roll-out has bungled the operation — the states are getting hammered by the surge of the virus, overwhelming medical facilites and vaccines are left on hold.
T-Rump’s bullshit-shop Operation Warp Speed was/is anything but and knew going in about distribution — Ashish K. Jha, a physician, health policy researcher and dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, explains the situation at The Washington Post yesterday morning on the roll-out failure:

This is striking.
We’ve known for months that vaccines were coming.
We know that vaccines only work when people get vaccinated.
Every dose of vaccine not given risks more illness and potential death.
The failure to vaccinate more quickly is tragic given that more than 3,000 Americans are dying of covid-19 every day.
At the current rate, we will surpass 400,000 deaths by Inauguration Day.

Operation Warp Speed now says it aims to vaccinate all Americans by June.
But we will not get there unless we understand what is happening and what we need to do to fix it.

How did we get from 100 million promised doses to just a few million people vaccinated?
It is a lesson in misunderstanding American federalism and a failure of national leadership.
The federal government and Operation Warp Speed saw their role as getting vaccines to the states, without considering what supports states would need to get vaccines to the people.
The Trump administration is now blaming the slow rollout on states.
This is political theater and obviously untrue.
States undoubtedly have a critical role to play in vaccine distribution.
But states alone can’t mount one of the largest vaccination efforts in recent history.
Moreover, not all 50 states are failing.

Regardless of the particular approach, this sort of planning should have happened in October and November.
The administration should have gone to Congress and gotten the money needed to set this up.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, the administration is blaming the states.
Of course, once a blame culture is set, the finger-pointing continues: In Mississippi, the health chief says it’s not the state’s job to ensure vaccines get into people’s arms and he is now blaming front-line providers for the slow rollout.

Emphasis now on Joe Biden — waiting for 18 days, 20 hours, and 6 minutes to pass.

(Illustration: ‘The Blue Umbrella 1914,’ by Helen Hyde, found here).

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