-
President Biden’s ambitious plan to improve the launch of the coronavirus vaccine in the United States has met an obstacle.
-
About 20 million doses of vaccine are missing, Politico said. The government handed them over to the states, but the states did not administer them to patients.
-
The Trump administration failed to track where the doses of the vaccine were going and when they were delivered to the states.
-
Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
President Biden has ambitious pandemic plans for his first months in office: by mid-February, he wants 100 federally supported coronavirus vaccination centers to be in place. By the end of April, he wants 100 million doses in the arms of Americans, which requires an average of 1 million injections per day.
But his government has already encountered an obstacle during the first 10 days at the White House: about 20 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have not been counted – the federal government paid and delivered them to the states, but there is no record that these doses distributed to patients.
Biden’s newly formed COVID response team spent the past week trying to manually track these millions of missed doses by calling health officials and health professionals from different states, Politico reported on Saturday.
Read more: Variants of the coronavirus threaten to halt the progress of the pandemic. See how the 4 largest vaccine manufacturers are reacting.
“I think they were really taken aback by this,” a Biden adviser told Politico. “It’s a mess.”
The previous administration chose not to track vaccine doses at all stages of the federal, state and patient process; “Operation Warp speed”, the vaccine implantation program initiated by Donald Trump, prioritized dose distribution and did not require states to provide updates on what happened to their doses until the injections were administered.
Fifty million doses have been distributed to US states as of Sunday, but only 31 million of those doses have been administered across the country, according to the CDC.
To speed up the launch of the vaccine in the country, Biden’s team must find out what is responsible for this big difference between the doses distributed and administered – and what the problem is.
‘Nobody had a complete picture’
The Trump administration hoped to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of 2020, but failed in part because it did not take responsibility for overseeing the launch of vaccines at the state level.
Many state health departments said they did not have sufficient funding and staff to administer the vaccinations en masse. Last month, the vaccine shortage forced clinics in states like Virginia to cancel vaccine appointments.
Biden called the launch of the vaccine in the United States under Trump “a terrible failure”.
The Trump administration did not pass on detailed data on how federal to state distribution worked to members of Biden’s transition team prior to his inauguration on January 20.
Although the federal government has a vaccine distribution tracker, called Tibério, the transition team did not have access to it until days before Biden took office, Politico said. It then took some time for Biden’s COVID response team to find out that Tiberius only tracked how many doses the states received and recorded the states indicating when and where the doses were administered.
Each part of the process between these two steps – distributing the vaccine to the states and those vaccines being placed on the arms – was an untracked black box.
“No one had a complete picture,” Julie Morita, a member of Biden’s transition team, told Politico. “The plans that were being made started from the assumption that more information would be available and would be revealed as soon as they reached the White House.”
‘There are places with vaccines that are not yet using’
Public health systems in states presumably track where vaccine doses are stored, when they are sent from state warehouses to clinics and how many doses are located. But for now, the federal government has no idea what this tracking is like and what distribution plan each state is following.
Biden’s aides told Politico that the missing doses are spread across the states, but that the COVID response team still needs to track them or find out why the vaccines are not being administered immediately.
“Much of our work over the next week will ensure that we can tighten deadlines to understand where the vaccine really is and when exactly it is administered,” said Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the CDC. USA Today Thursday.
A delay in reporting is probably responsible for 10% of missed doses, two officials told Politico. It takes up to three days for states to report that they have administered an injection.
But the other 18 million doses that remain missing are in limbo – stored in freezers and warehouses, kept in reserve at clinics or in transit – across the country.
Some states, concerned by the impending shortage of vaccines, are keeping hundreds of thousands of doses in reserve so that citizens who receive their first doses are guaranteed to have a second dose waiting for them after the interval of three or four weeks.
The Biden government hopes that more transparency about when and how many doses will be sent to states in the next three weeks will encourage state officials to stop keeping doses in reserve.
“We know that there are places in the country without enough vaccine and at the same time, there are places with vaccines that are not yet using,” Andy Slavitt, senior consultant on the COVID response team, told USA Today. “This is a natural challenge that states face.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
Originally published