His team arrived at the White House with a 200-page response plan ready to roll out. But instead, they have spent much of the last week trying to locate lost vaccines.
While signing a record number of Executive Orders, Biden’s team is still trying to locate upwards of 20 million vaccine doses that have been sent to states — so much for the national vaccination effort. Meanwhile, a series of new Covid-19 strains that threaten to derail the response.”
Most of the supply is apparently boxed away in warehouses, sitting idle in freezers or floating elsewhere in the complex distribution pipeline that runs from the administration to individual states.
The states with the smallest percentages of vaccines administered on the Bloomberg tracker are Rhode Island (52.6 percent), Kansas (53.6 percent), Alabama (53.6 percent), the District of Columbia, (54.2 percent), and Idaho and Massachusetts (tied at 54.6 percent). There is no simple geographic or political connection among the states on the bottom of the list; you can’t dismiss this as a “Deep South” problem or blame it on red-state governors.
Also, stories of vaccine doses being administered to hospital donors, boards of directors, and other wealthy not necessarily priority recipients start to pile up.