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“This is the quote from Mike Tyson: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,’ said one person with knowledge of the vaccination efforts and who is not authorized to discuss the job. “They plan. They are competent. It’s just the weight of everything when you sit in that chair. It’s heavy.”
Biden officials leading the coronavirus response launched a series of regular briefings this week to keep the public updated on the status of the pandemic and the government’s efforts to contain it and ship vaccines to as many people as possible. Americans possible.
But the briefings lacked detail. And behind the scenes, officials say, the team still struggled to get baseline information, liaise with the career officials who led the response, and develop a long-term strategy to bring – and then maintain. – the virus. under control.
“One of the virtues of a well-managed transition is that by the time you take the reins, you’ve developed rapport and trust with the career people you work with,” said the person familiar with the job. administration. “The yard has been unusually short,” the person added.
“No one had the full picture,” said Julie Morita, a member of Biden’s transition team and executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “The plans that were worked out were made on the assumption that more information would be available and be revealed once they entered the White House.
It’s a tall order that Biden officials have said they have anticipated for weeks, amid a difficult transition period that has required them to put together vaccine distribution plans and coordinate with health officials. of State.
Yet in the days since taking office, the Covid response team faced a situation that officials described as much worse than expected – and which sparked public assessments so grim as to surprised some of those who had worked in the old administration transition team.
On Tuesday, Biden warned that “the vaccination program is in worse shape than we had expected or expected”, echoing complaints from his chief of staff, Ron Klain, that “a plan did not really exist”.
Biden’s Covid Response Team has since made a concerted effort not to blame the Trump administration, an official said – even though their vague hints of a worse-than-expected situation have sparked speculation about the specific issues that ‘they met.
But those with knowledge of the response detailed new concerns that are largely centered on the federal government’s vaccine supply. Biden’s team is still trying to fully understand the whereabouts of the more than 20 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine that the federal government has purchased and distributed to states but has yet to record as being administered to patients.
Only a small percentage of people not counted for doses – around 2 million, two officials said – are due to delays in reporting the data, Biden’s team believes. That would mean that the rest of the crucial supply is locked in warehouses, idle in freezers, or floating elsewhere in the complex distribution pipeline that runs from administration to individual states.
It’s a dilemma that preceded the arrival of Team Biden, with Biden himself calling the first weeks of the vaccine rollout under the Trump administration a “dismal failure.”
Yet the response team underestimated from the start how difficult it would be to resolve.
Biden’s transition had only received high-level briefings on the distribution effort in the run-up to the Jan. 20 inauguration, a transition official said, and was largely kept away from detailed discussions of the field operation. The team did not have granular access to Tiberius – the central government system used to track vaccine distribution – until the final days of the transition.
It was only after Biden was sworn in that the Covid response team discovered that the system was blinded for much of the route the vaccines took from government distribution centers to arms of people.
Instead, once vaccine shipments were delivered to states, the responsibility for tracking them was left to individual state public health systems. The administration will not receive an update until the doses have actually been administered and an official dossier is submitted.
“I think they were really caught off guard by this,” one adviser said. “It’s a mess.”
Senior Biden officials have pointed out that the missing doses are spread across states, which remain largely responsible for getting them to health providers tasked with immunizing the tens of millions of people queuing for vaccines.
But the Covid team has since had to spend hours on the phone with various state officials trying to manually locate unused doses, a time-consuming task that squeezes resources and has yet to give officials a full picture of. the exact destination of the supplies.
They also sought to persuade healthcare providers to stop holding doses in reserve, a practice based on concerns that people might not be able to get the second injection of their two-dose regimen – but that is not. more necessary and only added to the confusion, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
In a call with White House officials Tuesday, Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said some states bear the brunt of the blame for the uneven deployment because of those reservations – a nuance that does not apply. not reflected in federal figures, according to appeal notes. obtained by POLITICO.
The complaint prompted the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, to issue clearer guidelines on how states should manage their allocated vaccines.
Illinois Democratic Governor JB Pritzker later blamed a Trump administration program that designated pharmacies to distribute vaccines to long-term care facilities to “bring down our numbers” because of the slowness with which we had to get vaccinated.
The White House has since allowed states to seize unused doses from the pharmacy program and reallocate them elsewhere.
“There’s no question they’re doing a better job,” George Helmy, chief of staff to Democratic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, said of the Biden administration. “We have a real transparent and collaborative partner.”
As they grapple with immediate distribution issues, federal officials have also rushed to develop detailed plans to eventually distribute the vaccines to larger populations beyond healthcare workers and older Americans – a project that people familiar with the effort say the Trump administration never even started. sure.
And although Biden’s team had planned to ramp up the pace of vaccine manufacturing over time, some Biden officials said they were shocked to learn shortly after inauguration day that there was little in the Federal Vaccine Pool – and the companies producing the vaccines were far from close. capable of producing as many doses as the Trump administration had projected in the previous months.
The Biden administration has since warned that supplies will remain limited until the summer, raising the possibility of persistent shortages even as the country’s daily immunization rate increases.
The White House on Friday applauded promising data on a new single-dose vaccine from Johnson & Johnson. But obstacles to production have dampened expectations for its immediate impact, with one federal official likening the anticipated flow of shots to “a trickle.”
This turned the early days of the Covid team into something closer to a triage operation than the more orderly deployment the administration had hoped for, especially since much of the Federal Ministry of Health operates with a small staff of career civil servants and a handful of early political appointments.
And while the Biden administration still continues to build mass vaccination sites and long-term planned preparations for the long-term response effort, officials said the time wasted navigating this first round of difficulties had delayed a response already likely to consume much of Biden. first year in office.
“It’s not over anytime soon,” said Craig Fugate, a former Obama administration administrator of FEMA who worked on the transition. “There might not be a bright red line where when we cross that line, we’re done and you’ll be fine.”
Rachel Roubein contributed to this report.
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