The rapid creation of Covid-19 vaccines was a triumph. So why is it taking so long to vaccinate Americans?
The answer begins with tens of millions of doses of the Covid-19 vaccine that were not used in medical freezers in the United States in the first weeks of launch.
At launch, the federal government reserved far more doses for nursing homes than the necessary facilities. A fragmented communication chain between the federal authorities who send the doses and the local sites that ultimately inject them, left vaccinators in the dark about how many patients they could schedule. Concerned about limited supplies, some hospitals and health departments withdrew doses to ensure they had enough to administer a second injection to the team or to attend to consultations, creating a bottleneck in the outflow.
Vaccinations are increasing now. But initial stumbles can extend the pandemic and leave more people unprotected. Health officials say the new variants of the coronavirus that seem to spread more easily make vaccine distribution more urgent.
The Trump administration invested heavily in rapid vaccine development, but left the last mile to send vaccines to states and localities. This approach has resulted in a number of systems, sometimes contradictory, and has not ensured that local websites have information about the vaccine shipments they needed to deliver vaccines quickly.