At a virtual press conference on Tuesday, Operation Warp Speed officials made an announcement that applauded US governors.
The federal government had been withholding millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to ensure a sufficient second dose for people inoculated in the initial implantation. Now, officials said, the entire reserve would be released to states so it could be used to save lives as quickly as possible during the worst pandemic outbreak to date.
“As we now have a consistent production rate, we can send all the doses that were in the physical reserve,” said the Secretary of Health and Human Services of the United States, Alex Azar. To ensure that this unexpected vaccine is not wasted, he urged states to expand eligibility for the vaccine to people over 65 and those of any age with a condition that makes them vulnerable to a COVID-19 infection.
It was good news, even though the announcement appeared to have been prompted by a similar one made by President-elect Joe Biden’s team a few days earlier. But, it seems, it was too good to be true.
State officials rightly expected this announcement to presage a larger shipment of doses of COVID-19, at least in the short term. But they would soon be disappointed.
“Last night, I received disturbing news, confirmed to me directly by General Leg of Operation Warp Speed: states will no longer receive shipments of vaccines from the national stock next week because there is no federal dose reserve,” said the governor of Oregon . Kate Brown tweeted on Friday morning.
As the Washington Post reported on Friday, there is simply no stock of vaccines to release. And OWS officials knew this on Tuesday.
What they apparently wanted to say is that the federal government would not prevent any future doses, a change possible because vaccination production has become reliable.
But that was not at all clear at the press conference or in what was apparently said to state officials. “Governors were repeatedly informed by @HHSgov that there was a strategic vaccine stockpile, and this week, the American people were informed that they would be released to increase the supply of vaccines,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee tweeted on Friday. market.
In response to the Warp Speed announcement, states like Oregon and California expanded eligibility for people over 65, as Azar suggested. The news spread quickly and doctors’ offices and clinics were flooded with calls from people looking for appointments to receive injections that don’t exist.
And who will take the blame for the federal government’s broken promise? It will probably not be the Operation Warp Speed team, which will soon leave, or the Trump White House, which once again left the states spinning in the wind with the COVID-19 pandemic.