"A Huge Potential for Chaos": How the COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout Was Hobbled by Turf Wars and Magical

[LiberalArkie]

“A Huge Potential for Chaos”: How the COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout Was Hobbled by Turf Wars and Magical Thinking

One Pandemic, Two Task Forces

On January 5, 2021, the day before an angry mob invaded the U.S. Capitol and called for him to be hanged for disloyalty to the president, Vice President Mike Pence convened his long-suffering COVID-19 task force at the White House to address a vaccine rollout that had devolved into chaos. On the agenda was a long list of concerns, from expanding eligibility for the shots to releasing second doses, which until then had been held back.

Among those in attendance were the task force’s coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield. But the person most responsible for the rollout, the secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar, was missing. Azar, along with the secretary of defense, was in charge of Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s vaccine development and rollout program. So where was he?

Sixty miles away, it turned out, inside a secure situation room at Camp David. There, Azar and a small group of top aides and military members of Operation Warp Speed were busy conducting their own analysis of the rollout’s problems. At least one blindsided White House task force member was “shocked” upon learning of the separate meeting.

The bureaucratic brinkmanship of the dueling meetings would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so high. Three weeks after the first vaccines rolled out of warehouses, the distribution effort was failing to live up to the Trump administration’s extravagant promises. Too few people were getting the shots, and states were ending each day with unadministered doses that had to be discarded, owing to the onerous refrigeration requirements.

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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/how-the-covid-19-vaccine-rollout-was-hobbled

Very good reporting.