“It’s Mike Tyson’s quote: ‘Everyone has a plan to get punched in the mouth,’” said a person with knowledge of the vaccine’s effort who is not authorized to discuss the work. “They are planning. They are competent. It’s just the weight of everything when you sit in that chair. It’s heavy.”
Biden officials who lead the coronavirus response released a series of regular reports this week to keep the public informed about the state of the pandemic and the government’s efforts to contain it and send vaccines to as many Americans as possible.
But the instructions contained few details. And, behind the scenes, officials say, the team was still struggling to get basic information, connect with career government officials who are executing the response, and build a long-term strategy to bring – and then keep – the virus under control. control.
“One of the virtues of a well-managed transition is that by the time you take the reins, you have developed some relationship and trust with the career people you are working with,” said a person familiar with the government’s work. The “courtship was abnormally short,” added the person.
“No one had a complete picture,” said Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team and executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “The plans that were being made were based on the assumption that more information would be available and be revealed as soon as they enter the White House. “
It is a major challenge that Biden officials said they had been anticipating for weeks, amid a difficult transition period that left them struggling to set up vaccine distribution plans and coordinate with state health officials.
Still, in the days since taking over, Covid’s response team faced a situation that officials described as far worse than expected – and this generated public assessments so severe that they surprised some who had worked on the old transition team. from the government.
On Tuesday, Biden warned that the “vaccine program is in a worse state than we anticipated or expected”, echoing complaints from his chief of staff, Ron Klain, that a “plan did not really exist”.
Since then, Covid de Biden’s response team has made a concerted effort not to blame the Trump administration, an official said – even though their vague hints of a worse-than-expected situation led to speculation about what specific problems they encountered.
But people with knowledge of the answer have detailed new concerns that are mainly focused on the federal government’s vaccine supply. Biden’s team is still trying to gain a firm understanding of the whereabouts of more than 20 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine that the federal government purchased and distributed to states, but has not yet registered as being administered to patients.
Only a small percentage of people not counted per dose – about 2 million, said two officials – are due to delays in data reporting, Biden’s team believes. This would mean that the rest of the crucial supply is stored in warehouses, idle in freezers or floating elsewhere in the complex distribution pipeline that runs from administration to individual states.
This is a dilemma prior to the arrival of the Biden team, with Biden himself classifying the first weeks of the vaccine’s launch under the Trump administration as a “total failure”.
However, the response team initially underestimated how difficult it would be to fix.
The Biden transition only received high-level instructions on the distribution effort in the run-up to the January 20 inauguration, said a transition officer, and was kept out of detailed discussions of the ground operation. The team did not gain granular access to Tiberius – the central government system used to track the distribution of vaccines – until the final days of the transition.
Only after Biden took the oath did the Covid response team discover that the system was blind to much of the route that vaccines traveled from government distribution centers into people’s arms.
Instead, once vaccine shipments are delivered to states, the responsibility for tracking them has been left to individual states’ public health systems. The administration only gets an update when the doses are actually administered and an official record is sent.
“I think they were really taken aback by this,” said one adviser. “It’s a mess.”
Biden officials pointed out that missed doses are spread across the states, which continue to be largely responsible for taking them to health care providers tasked with vaccinating the tens of millions of people waiting in line for injections.
But the Covid team had to spend hours on the phone with several state officials trying to manually track unused doses, a time-consuming task that has undermined resources and has yet to give employees a complete picture of exactly where supplies are going.
They also tried to persuade health care professionals to stop maintaining reserve doses, a practice born out of concerns about people who would not be able to get the second injection from their two-dose regimen – but which is no longer needed and only contributed for confusion, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
In a call with White House officials on Tuesday, Republican Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson vented that some states are bearing the brunt of the blame for uneven distribution because of these reserves – a nuance not reflected in federal figures, according to notes of the call obtained by POLITICO.
The complaint led to a promise by the Director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, to issue clearer guidelines on how states should administer their allocated vaccines.
Illinois Democratic Governor JB Pritzker later blamed a Trump administration program, which designated pharmacies to distribute vaccines at long-term care facilities, for “decreasing our number of people” because of the slow pace of getting vaccines.
The White House has since given states permission to seize unused doses from the pharmacy program and relocate them elsewhere.
“There is no doubt that they are doing a better job,” said George Helmy, chief of staff to New Jersey Democratic governor Phil Murphy, about the Biden administration. “We have a real partner who is being transparent and collaborative.”
While grappling with immediate distribution issues, federal officials also rushed to build detailed plans to eventually distribute vaccines to broader populations, in addition to health workers and older Americans – a project that people familiar with the effort say the government Trump never started on.
And while Biden’s team planned to increase the pace of vaccine manufacturing over time, some Biden officials said they were shocked to learn, shortly after Induction Day, that there was little in the federal vaccine reserve – and that companies that produced the vaccines were nowhere near as capable of producing as many doses as the Trump administration had projected in previous months.
Since then, the Biden government has warned that supplies will remain limited until the summer, increasing the possibility of continued shortages, even as the country’s daily vaccination rate increases.
The White House celebrated promising data on a new Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine on Friday. But production hurdles have reduced expectations of its immediate impact, with a federal official comparing the anticipated flow of photos to “a trickle”.
This transformed the early days of the Covid team into something closer to a screening operation than the more orderly implementation the government expected, especially since much of the federal health department operates with a small team of career workers and some of the first political nominees.
And while the Biden government is still pushing ahead with the construction of mass vaccination sites and long-planned preparations for the long-term response effort, officials said the time spent navigating this initial set of difficulties delayed a response that he will probably consume a large portion of Biden’s dose during his first year in office.
“It won’t end anytime soon,” said Craig Fugate, a former FEMA administrator in the Obama administration who worked on the transition. “There may not be a bright red line where, when we cross that line, we will finish, we will finish and everything will be great.”
Rachel Roubein contributed to this report.