Operation Warp Speed promised to accelerate the development, manufacture and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
“It means big and fast – a huge scientific, industrial and logistical effort,” President Trump said at a news conference announcing the effort last May.
The government came on the scientific front, breaking the record for launching a vaccine on the market and silencing critics who said it would take years.
But so far the operation is failing in its other main mission: bringing vaccines to the American public.
Despite months to prepare, the distribution effort seems to be giving way to the bureaucracy. Hotlines and subscription sites have crashed. The massive demand is also evident in the long lines of elderly people camped at health clinics.
At the current rate, it would take years to vaccinate the US public.
“There seems to have been a pretty substantial breakdown in the planning process,” said David Johnson, a Chicago-based health consultant. “The feds were just focused on, ‘OK, let’s just get the vaccines to your door.'”
More than 17 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been sent to hospitals and pharmacies across the country, but as of Tuesday morning, less than 5 million have been used, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. U.S.
Federal health officials said in December that they planned to vaccinate 20 million Americans before the new year.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease specialist, described the problems as “some flaws”.
“So we are not where we want to be, there is no doubt about it,” he said on Sunday. “But I think we can get there if we really accelerate.”
The injections are free, but the federal government left it up to the state authorities to decide how to distribute them.
When vaccines arrive at a distribution site, several factors must be aligned. There should be enough space in the freezer, syringes and healthcare professionals to administer vaccines. Most importantly, people should be screened for eligibility and instructed on when and where to show up for injections – this is where most breakdowns occurred.
In Houston, where elders and people aged 16 and over with chronic illnesses are eligible, a hotline was interrupted after 250,000 people called.
People were told to register in person on Saturday at the city’s vaccination clinic and then were told to call to make an appointment on Sunday.
“Vehicles lined up at the scene on Sunday morning, many without an appointment,” said Scott Packard, a spokesman for the city’s health department. “We decided to serve the people who were in line with the remaining commitments, instead of rejecting them.”
The city registered online on Monday and shortly afterwards announced that there would be no further appointments until more vaccines arrived.
Meanwhile, neighboring Harris County received 6,000 doses and tried to distribute them through county agencies to teachers and qualified people in nursing homes, shelters for the homeless and in the county prison. But a registration link for these workers crashed after it leaked on social media last week.
On Monday, the Mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner, promised to set up a “big mega site” for vaccination until this Saturday.
In Lee County, Florida, doses were offered on a first-come, first-served basis. The news showed elderly people lining up in the county health department with garden chairs, waiting for hours to see if they could survive.
In Tampa, the Hillsborough County vaccine registration site crashed minutes after it went live Monday morning. The county now accepts reservations by phone only.
Several other Florida counties are using Eventbrite, a site best known for selling concert tickets, to register vaccines. Police warned this week about fake Eventbrite sites that are charging seniors for vaccination appointments that don’t exist.
Registering residents of nursing homes for vaccination faces a different challenge: according to federal law, residents or their representatives must give informed consent for any treatment.
“We are seeing a lot of last-minute confusion,” said Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, a defense organization based in New York. “It really should have been done months ago, when we knew in advance that hopefully a vaccine was coming.”
He blamed federal authorities for not informing long-term care managers about consent requirements.
Under the federal Pharmacy Partnership for the Long-Term Care Program, 429,000 residents of long-term care facilities received initial doses of 3.3 million distributed, the CDC reported on Monday.
In the meantime, in some cases, state and hospital officials are discussing charges that unused doses remain in healthcare systems.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott tweeted that “a significant portion of vaccines distributed throughout Texas may be on hospital shelves, instead of being given to vulnerable Texans.”
Carrie Williams, a spokesman for Texas Hospital Assn., Disputed the claim, saying “hospitals are moving as fast as humanly possible”.
In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo said that hospitals that do not use their supplies a week after receipt will be removed from distribution networks and possibly fined $ 100,000.
“We want these vaccines in people’s arms,” he said.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also threatened to withdraw scheduled shipments from hospitals if they did not vaccinate faster. Hospitals said they need more staff to administer the vaccines.
In fact, many of the health systems responsible for delivering vaccines are struggling to keep up with the unprecedented demand for coronavirus testing and patient care amid a huge spike in infections, according to the United States surgeon general. , Jerome Adams.
Another potential reason for the bottleneck is that high-priority groups, such as hospital workers, were unexpectedly concerned about the injections. A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29% of healthcare professionals were “hesitant about the vaccine”, slightly more than the general population, 27%.
In California, for example, nearly 500 doses were made available to healthcare professionals at St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Red Bluff, Tehama County. The hospital has already returned about 200 of them to the health department.
About 60% of workers in Ohio nursing homes chose to skip the vaccine. And in Washington, after several rescuers missed their appointments, a pharmacist signaled a law student who was buying groceries and offered him a dose to prevent it from being wasted – an emergency measure permitted by local health guidelines.
Slow implementation bodes ill for hopes of quickly vaccinating large numbers of people and obtaining collective immunity, which experts say is essential to contain the virus.
Johnson, the health consultant, said the situation reminded him of the Obamacare launch, when the damaged Affordable Care Act website threatened to damage the system. The HealthCare.gov site crashed just two hours after its launch in 2013 and subsequently was able to handle only about 35,000 visitors at a time.
“It’s very difficult to design a website, but that’s where they hit their toes,” said Johnson.
The disaster undermined confidence in the system and gave critics an opening – and so could the COVID-19 vaccine, he said.
“If we are not effective at launch, the incentive to get the vaccine is not as strong,” he said.
Baumgaertner and Kaleem reported from Los Angeles, Hennessy-Fiske from Houston and Read from Seattle.