Incompetent State Governments Slowing Vaccine

[Redwingfan9]

Only 2 million vaccine doses have been administered so far despite states being in possession of well over 10 million doses. The dems will no doubt blame Trump and yet it was Pelosi who held up $8 billion in vaccine rollout money holding up the stimulus bill for the last 6 months.

This is yet another example of why products should never be in the hands of government. Right now states are playing middle man, determining where vaccines go and who gets them. They're completely incompetent at this job. Government is never able to adequately determine demand and allocate resources accordingly. Had this been left in the hands of the private sector, administration of the vaccine would be far more efficient. Fascism/socialism never works.

Inside the vaccination shambles: Why millions of doses have not been administered | Daily Mail Online

 

[JohnDB]

Look, I agree with you up to a point.

This past fall the school systems in all 50 states knew that the pandemic wasn't going to be over and that they needed to do something different.
They knew for 6 months.

They did nothing until the last two weeks before school started to run about and whine that they couldn't do anything. IOW being completely useless.

Now these Vaccines were telegraphed coming available for 6 months as well.
Everyone knew that they were coming.

Every single governor, town council, health department, and janitor knew they were coming.

Did they do anything to prepare?
NOPE!

They all did try to get their sound bites on television though...and act like they were working hard. They were goofing off, politicking and doing anything and everything except for their job.

So...

Vote every single one of these people OUT!
From every town council member to mayor and governor OUT OF OFFICE. Just say "no incumbents" and move on with life.
Doesn't matter what party they are a member of...THEY ALL FAILED US.

 

[JohnDB]

Here's an article discussing this with a slightly different approach...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/grap..._gl=1*7cs6zq*_ga*MTE4ODEwMjQwNC4xNjAxMjUxMjgy

Now they're not including the doses Vanderbilt got themselves somehow...but they sure are recording the numbers vaccinated.

 

[Redwingfan9]

Look, I agree with you up to a point.

This past fall the school systems in all 50 states knew that the pandemic wasn't going to be over and that they needed to do something different.
They knew for 6 months.

They did nothing until the last two weeks before school started to run about and whine that they couldn't do anything. IOW being completely useless.

Now these Vaccines were telegraphed coming available for 6 months as well.
Everyone knew that they were coming.

Every single governor, town council, health department, and janitor knew they were coming.

Did they do anything to prepare?
NOPE!

They all did try to get their sound bites on television though...and act like they were working hard. They were goofing off, politicking and doing anything and everything except for their job.

So...

Vote every single one of these people OUT!
From every town council member to mayor and governor OUT OF OFFICE. Just say "no incumbents" and move on with life.
Doesn't matter what party they are a member of...THEY ALL FAILED US.

I agree they're all incompetent. The problem is that the most incompetent like Cuomo and Whitmer have the highest approval ratings. It pays to have a lap dog press supporting you.

 

[nonaeroterraqueous]

I really don't care.

 

[Isilwen]

The dems will no doubt blame Trump and yet it was Pelosi who held up $8 billion in vaccine rollout money holding up the stimulus bill for the last 6 months.

The blame is on both sides. Not just on Pelosi. The Republicans wanted what they wanted and the Democrats wanted what they wanted and neither would really budge.

 

[Redwingfan9]

The blame is on both sides. Not just on Pelosi. The Republicans wanted what they wanted and the Democrats wanted what they wanted and neither would really budge.

House Dems never offered a stand alone vaccine bill. All spending bills originate in the House. I won't absolve the Republicans but the House dems control the purse strings.

 

[Isilwen]

House Dems never offered a stand alone vaccine bill. All spending bills originate in the House. I won't absolve the Republicans but the House dems control the purse strings.

So, all those times that McConnell said no to what the Democrats wanted, means nothing? McConnell wanted something different than the House. Why would the House pass something that would get shot down in the Senate?

This is what I am talking about where both are to blame.

 

[Redwingfan9]

So, all those times that McConnell said no to what the Democrats wanted, means nothing? McConnell wanted something different than the House. Why would the House pass something that would get shot down in the Senate?

This is what I am talking about where both are to blame.

Saying no to $4 trillion we can't afford is hardly outrageous. We needed $8 billion for the vaccine. Spending starts in the House,.Pelosi never proposed it as a stand alone expenditure.

 

[Isilwen]

Saying no to $4 trillion we can't afford is hardly outrageous.

I disagree. The American people need help, especially now. Here in Florida, our cases shot up from over 13k yesterday to over 17k today new cases of Covid-19. That is the highest total we have had here in Florida. People need stimulus money as jobs are still shuttered all over the country.

Pelosi never proposed it as a stand alone expenditure.

Again, I see it differently. I don't think she should have made it a stand-alone.

We'll probably never see eye-to-eye on this. So I am just going to stop here.

 

[Redwingfan9]

I disagree. The American people need help, especially now. Here in Florida, our cases shot up from over 13k yesterday to over 17k today new cases of Covid-19. That is the highest total we have had here in Florida. People need stimulus money as jobs are still shuttered all over the country.



Again, I see it differently. I don't think she should have made it a stand-alone.

We'll probably never see eye-to-eye on this. So I am just going to stop here.

Prioritizing $8 billion for vaccines strikes me as a wise decision rather than holding that up while fighting over other matters. We're a nation $28 trillion in debt, spending $4 trillion on stimulus would have been foolish. The quickest way to end all this is with a vaccine, unfortunately Pelosi's actions delayed the administration of the vaccine and thus prolonged the nonsense.

 

[Redwingfan9]

Look, I agree with you up to a point.

This past fall the school systems in all 50 states knew that the pandemic wasn't going to be over and that they needed to do something different.
They knew for 6 months.

They did nothing until the last two weeks before school started to run about and whine that they couldn't do anything. IOW being completely useless.

Now these Vaccines were telegraphed coming available for 6 months as well.
Everyone knew that they were coming.

Every single governor, town council, health department, and janitor knew they were coming.

Did they do anything to prepare?
NOPE!

They all did try to get their sound bites on television though...and act like they were working hard. They were goofing off, politicking and doing anything and everything except for their job.

So...

Vote every single one of these people OUT!
From every town council member to mayor and governor OUT OF OFFICE. Just say "no incumbents" and move on with life.
Doesn't matter what party they are a member of...THEY ALL FAILED US.

They were too busy destroying businesses and people's lives to prepare for the vaccine. This is a typical problem with government, they're only interested in political expedience right now. What happens tomorrow is tomorrow's problem.

Because this vaccine is outside the free market, it will be administered in the most inefficient way possible. There is no incentive for the state to move quickly, there's no incentive for the people administering the vaccine to put any care into what they're doing and there is no incentive on the part of the public to treat the vaccine with care. When something is free and costs us nothing we don't care about it much and treat it poorly. When there are no customers to please and no market to respond to, inefficiency rules. That's what we're seeing now.

 

[Redwingfan9]

So, all those times that McConnell said no to what the Democrats wanted, means nothing? McConnell wanted something different than the House. Why would the House pass something that would get shot down in the Senate?

This is what I am talking about where both are to blame.

McConnell got what he wanted. Pelosi didn't. In fact, she could have had double what the final bill was back in October but she refused for political reasons. She then went and lost half of her House majority. Pelosi lost the stimulus fight and in doing so failed people on the vaccine rollout.

 

[JohnDB]

They were too busy destroying businesses and people's lives to prepare for the vaccine. This is a typical problem with government, they're only interested in political expedience right now. What happens tomorrow is tomorrow's problem.

Because this vaccine is outside the free market, it will be administered in the most inefficient way possible. There is no incentive for the state to move quickly, there's no incentive for the people administering the vaccine to put any care into what they're doing and there is no incentive on the part of the public to treat the vaccine with care. When something is free and costs us nothing we don't care about it much and treat it poorly. When there are no customers to please and no market to respond to, inefficiency rules. That's what we're seeing now.

I'm not sure how Vanderbilt University got a deal for its doses. But they have maybe exchanged research work for the finished products. They have a huge stockpile they are administering as fast as possible....in several locations like auditoriums and gymnasiums because of the sheer numbers of people shuttling through.

They are at least 20,000+ of the administered Vaccines to their workforce and medical students in several locations. Probably more....I haven't checked lately.

Their doses aren't counted in amongst what has been delivered to the state...but the numbers of people vaccinated have been. So it's going to look better for the state than the truth.

Heads truly need to roll on this one.

 

[Redwingfan9]

I'm not sure how Vanderbilt University got a deal for its doses. But they have maybe exchanged research work for the finished products. They have a huge stockpile they are administering as fast as possible....in several locations like auditoriums and gymnasiums because of the sheer numbers of people shuttling through.

They are at least 20,000+ of the administered Vaccines to their workforce and medical students in several locations. Probably more....I haven't checked lately.

Their doses aren't counted in amongst what has been delivered to the state...but the numbers of people vaccinated have been. So it's going to look better for the state than the truth.

Heads truly need to roll on this one.

The problem is that it's a problem in both red and blue states. It wouldn't shock me if America's most evil governors (Newsom, Cuomo, Whitmer and other blue state dems) slow rolled the vaccine to punish Trump and benefit Biden. However, red states are having similar problems.

All of them are incompetent, all of them are vaccinating the wrong people. This pandemic ends when deaths are dramatically reduced. Vaccinating Healthcare workers should be a second tier priority. People over 60 represent 90% of the deaths and hospitalizations. Vaccinate them and the insanity should end quickly.

 

[JohnDB]

The problem is that it's a problem in both red and blue states. It wouldn't shock me if America's most evil governors (Newsom, Cuomo, Whitmer and other blue state dems) slow rolled the vaccine to punish Trump and benefit Biden. However, red states are having similar problems.

All of them are incompetent, all of them are vaccinating the wrong people. This pandemic ends when deaths are dramatically reduced. Vaccinating Healthcare workers should be a second tier priority. People over 60 represent 90% of the deaths and hospitalizations. Vaccinate them and the insanity should end quickly.

From what I've been seeing is that it's the nursing homes that have been the problem...
They have the Vaccines but are not using them. It could be a reporting issue but I'm smelling a rat somewhere.

 

[hedrick]

Priorities are more complex than you acknowledge:

* One big problem is treating the sick people. Protecting health workers protects our ability to deal with the illness, which isn’t going away immediately.

* Old people die more, but we also need to stop the spread. For that, it’s more important to get people who by the nature of their jobs have to be out and in contact with others.

So you’re seeing compromises. Health workers first, then jobs with lots of contact, and people over 80 and in nursing homes.

States have had a long time to do some planning, but specifics of how vaccine is going to be distributed weren’t known until recently. It’s always harder to coordinate lots of different groups. States have to coordinate their own health departments, the Feds who are making some decisions, the vaccine suppliers, shippers, and various places that are administering the vaccine. State health departments don’t have the staff to do any of this themselves. In fact because of the large number of organizations involved, there are delays in reporting how many people have been vaccinated.

The Federal government could do logistics and vaccination themselves, coordinating additional local resources where needed, and make the problem a lot less complex. State health departments weren’t designed for a massive project like this.

The fact that every state is having the same problems makes it very hard to claim incompetence. Except for ideologues who think that all government are incompetent at everything. If you want to be political a more likely story is that Trump doesn’t want to risk being responsible for anything.

 

[hedrick]

From what I've been seeing is that it's the nursing homes that have been the problem...
They have the Vaccines but are not using them. It could be a reporting issue but I'm smelling a rat somewhere.

At least in NJ, they don't ship vaccines to nursing homes. They don't have the ability to store or administer them in bulk. Teams have to go around to each site, several times. So nursing homes have to register and set up dates. This will only take a couple of weeks, but it explains why vaccination didn't happen immediately.

There's another issue: after getting the vaccine you are often mildly ill for a couple of days. You don't want the nursing home staff to be all ill at once, nor at the same time the residents are ill and need support. So even if it was possible to do everyone the same day, you wouldn't want to.

(The same applies to hospitals. You wouldn't want to do all staff the same day, even if you could.)

 

[hedrick]

It's going to get even harder in the next phase. How do you schedule a million essential workers in a state? How you do even document which people are essential? Even if a single group was doing the whole thing, trying to do that quickly would not be possible.

I'd suggest looking at what happened with PPE as a model. It took a while for everyone to ramp up, but they did. Getting masks is no longer an issue most places. This will probably take at least a month to start. And each of about three phases will have its own problems. Fortunately the phases can overlap, so as soon as vaccinations of essential personnel get moving (late January?), we should be able to maintain a reasonable pace.

 

[JohnDB]

It's going to get even harder in the next phase. How do you schedule a million essential workers in a state? How you do even document which people are essential? Even if a single group was doing the whole thing, trying to do that quickly would not be possible.

I'd suggest looking at what happened with PPE as a model. It took a while for everyone to ramp up, but they did. Getting masks is no longer an issue most places. This will probably take at least a month to start. And each of about three phases will have its own problems. Fortunately the phases can overlap, so as soon as vaccinations of essential personnel get moving (late January?), we should be able to maintain a reasonable pace.

Ummmm....it's not that difficult or complicated. It takes a maximum of two minutes to record the information on a computer and one minute to actually inject someone.

They have had over six months to prepare for the vaccine arrival and implement the plan once they arrived.

It's pure negligent incompetence...the same thing we seen in the fall with the school systems across the nation. They did NOTHING TO PREPARE.