Even as we hudde in isolation from the gravest emergency maybe in a long, long time — COVID-19 — the virus keeps exploding all across the planet and overwhelming the US without an end in sight.
As of this afternoon, the US has 17,878,805 confirmed cases and 320,790 deaths — 17 million!
Here in California it’s become the shits: “We’re getting crushed. I’m not going to sugarcoat this. We are getting crushed.”
And with 52,281 new cases yesterday, and more than 41,000 today, our ICU beds are near-about nonexistent.
Even the arrival of a vaccine — a tiny, flickering light at the end of a dark, long tunnel — is fucked.
Just as we get tanked: ‘California, where an explosion in cases is straining intensive care units to the breaking point, will receive 160,000 fewer vaccine doses than state officials had anticipated next week — a roughly 40-percent reduction.‘
T-Rump’s White House, of course, downplayed any problems, reportedly ‘citing a confusion over semantics.’
We just knew this was coming:
Pfizer says it has "millions more doses" of its vaccine waiting in a warehouse for the U.S. government to tell it where to send it, via @TheTerminal.
"As of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses," Pfizer said.
— Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) December 17, 2020
In an administration riddled with terrible incompetence, any operation dubbed, ‘Operation Warp Speed,’ most-likely isn’t — remember Brad Parscale’s ‘Death Star’ (incompetence coupled with ignorance) — and with the T-Rump’s history of loving other people’s pain, the COVID vaccine distribution apparatus is a joke. The punchline, though, is that the T-Rump’s part in the roll-out process ends a few days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, so we can expect further delays/foul-ups coming ahead.
Similar shit with the Biden transition meetings with the DOD, halting the needed conferences.
Meanwhile, the delays in the COVID vaccine roll-out is just another case of bullshit (Vanity Fair):
Which is why it is so maddening that Donald Trump and his administration seem to be so unprepared for the moment we’ve long been waiting for.
The White House reportedly turned down “multiple” offers from Pfizer over the summer to set aside additional doses for the United States.
And of the vaccines the U.S. does have, a shitload are apparently just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, ready to be delivered, if only the Trump administration would give the company the word.“This week, we successfully shipped all 2.9 million doses that we were asked to ship by the U.S. Government to locations specified by them,” Pfizer said in a statement Thursday.
“We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses.”The company’s statement came after the Trump administration informed several states that they would receive up to 40 percent fewer vaccine doses next week than they’d been expecting.
The White House implied the problem was on Pfizer’s end, but the company contradicted that explanation. “Pfizer is not having any production issues with our COVID-19 vaccine,” it said in the statement, “and no shipments containing the vaccine are on hold or delayed.
The big question is why wasn’t these problems seen before hand — maybe an answer: T-Rump.
"There was an Operation Warp Speed for the vaccine development and not for the distribution. The scientific achievement is useless if it can’t get to people’s arms fast enough to save lives." https://t.co/EKaw3sZtUV
— David Dayen (@ddayen) December 10, 2020
Dayen at The Anerican Prospect at the end of last month, reviewing the already looming vaccine distribution operation — highlight:
But these innovations, which will have wide-ranging effects into the future, collide with the near-term block and tackle of how you get a drug manufactured, stored, and shipped to every corner of the globe, to be administered, twice, to virtually everyone on the planet.
At some point the science gives way to a logistics operation on a scale nobody has ever seen before.
Compounding this difficulty is the fact that Joe Biden’s transition has no access to the vaccine data and is frozen out from the decision-making process.The infrastructure we currently have for vaccine distribution is by definition weak, because the scale of what’s needed with this is so massive.
The Vaccine for Children program provides something like 3 million shots a year.
We need 600 million in a matter of a few months, just for the U.S. And the big, glaring problem is that, in our federal system, the primary role in actually getting the vaccine delivered to people goes to states and localities.
And incredibly, there’s practically no money for this purpose right now.
Read it and weep…
