As COVID-19 cntinues to surge apparently unabated, this morning Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received a vaccine dose while pleading for all Americans to get inoculated, rightfully: “Literally this is about saving lives.”

She’s way-correct, but the problem is logistics and idiocy — the COVID vaccine roll-out has been anything but smooth (h/t for the tweet BJ):

JFC: " ….Pfizer, which manufactures one of the two Covid vaccines approved for emergency use in the U.S., began asking the Trump administration in September to help the pharmaceutical giant obtain some supplies needed for production but was disappointed by a lack of response."

— Bruce Duck (@BruceDuck2) December 28, 2020

A major hindrance, of course, is the T-Rump’s administration’s bullshit operation — no one in his circle can function with any type finesse, but coupled with incompetency is America’s health system, broken at best and hard to handle.
One view via The Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday:

Even before there was a vaccine, some seasoned doctors and public health experts warned, Cassandra-like, that its distribution would be “a logistical nightmare.”

After Week 1 of the rollout, “nightmare” sounds like an apt description.

Dozens of states say they didn’t receive nearly the number of promised doses.
Pfizer says millions of doses sat in its storerooms because no one from President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed task force told them where to ship them.
A number of states have few sites that can handle the ultra-cold storage required for the Pfizer product, so, for example, front-line workers in Georgia have had to travel 40 minutes to get a shot.
At some hospitals, residents treating COVID patients protested that they had not received the vaccine while administrators did, even though they work from home and don’t treat patients.

The potential for more chaos is high.
Vivek Murthy, named as the next surgeon general under President-elect Joe Biden, said this week that the Trump administration’s prediction — that the general population would get the vaccine in April — was realistic only if everything went smoothly.
He instead predicted wide distribution by summer or fall.

The Trump administration had expressed confidence that the rollout would be smooth, because it was being overseen by a four-star general, Gustave Perna, an expert in logistics.
But it turns out that getting fuel, tanks and tents into war-torn mountainous Afghanistan is in many ways simpler than passing out a vaccine in our privatized, profit-focused, and highly fragmented medical system.
Perna apologized last week, saying he wanted to “take personal responsibility.”
It’s really mostly not his fault.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. health-care system has shown that it is not built for a coordinated pandemic response (among many other things).
States took wildly different COVID-19 prevention measures; individual hospitals varied in their ability to face this kind of national disaster; and there were huge regional disparities in test availability — with a slow ramp-up in availability due, at least in some part, because no payment or billing mechanism was established.

Why should vaccine distribution be any different?

Instead of a central health-directed strategy, we have multiple companies competing to capture their financial piece of the pandemic health-care pie, each with its patent-protected product as well as its own supply chain and shipping methods.

One must remember there’s been absolutely no ‘strategy’ coming from the T-Rump, and even with a messed-up health-care system, the vaccine process should have at least understood those failings, and took them into consideration when planning this shit.
In a better path, supposedly Joe Biden today will today address the vaccine fuck-up — per Axios yesterday:

A member of President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 advisory team told CNBC on Monday that Biden plans to invoke the Defense Production Act to boost production of coronavirus vaccines.

Why it matters: The law allows the president to direct the private sector to prioritize manufacturing in the interest of national defense.

The big picture: Biden will invoke the wartime law to ensure that “personal protective equipment, the test capacity and the raw materials for the vaccines are produced in adequate supply,” Biden adviser Dr. Celine Gounder told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Gounder added that under the Biden administration, the U.S. will see “a major increase” in testing to track mild and asymptomatic cases of the virus, as well as in genomic surveillance, which tracks mutations of the virus to pick up on new variants.
“We did not do that routinely,” Gounder said, referring to genomic surveillance under the Trump administration.
“We have the technology. We just chose not to spend the money on that kind of public health surveillance.”

The state of play: The U.S. government has purchased 400 million doses of coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna through Operation Warp Speed, including a 100 million-dose agreement reached with Pfizer last week amid revelations that some states would receive between 25-percent-40-percent fewer vaccine doses than originally projected.

The U.S. has also secured 400 million doses of vaccines from Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Sanofi/GlaxoSmithKline that have not yet been authorized by the FDA.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has said every American who wants a vaccine should be able to receive one by June 2021.

Azar is one of T-Rump’s boys so forget that — meanwhile the virus spirals (The Washingtn Post this morning):

While health officials face criticism for the pace of vaccinations, coronavirus-related hospitalizations are hovering around 118,000, the highest seven-day average since the virus was first reported in the United States in January.
New cases are currently averaging around 200,000 per day, while the deaths continue to spike, having reached a record 3,406 — higher than the number of fatalities in the Sept. 11 attacks — on Dec. 17.

Officials have expressed concern that holiday travel could fuel an even greater surge of infections, straining the capacities of already struggling health-care systems. In his CNN interview, (Anthony) Fauci urged people who have recently traveled to avoid gathering with people outside their households.

“That’s what we’re concerned about — that in addition to the surge, we’re going to have an increase superimposed on that surge, which could make January even worse than December,” Fauci said.

And here we are:

Just saying…

(Illustration: Edvard Munch‘s ‘The Scream,’ lithograph version, found here).