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Operation Warp Speed has pledged to speed up the development, manufacture and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
“It means big, and it means fast – a massive scientific, industrial and logistical undertaking,” President Trump said at a press conference announcing the effort last May.
The administration stepped in on the scientific front, shattering the record for bringing a vaccine to market and silencing critics who said it would take years.
But so far, the operation has failed in its other main mission: to provide vaccines to the American public.
Despite months of preparation, the distribution effort seems to falter under the weight of bureaucracy. Registration hotlines and websites crashed. The massive demand is also evident in the long lines of elderly people camped in the health clinics.
At the current rate, it would take years to immunize the American public.
“There seems to have been a pretty big breakdown in the planning process,” said David Johnson, a Chicago-based health care consultant. “The authorities just focused on the fact, ‘OK, we’ll just get the vaccines delivered to you.’”
More than 17 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to hospitals and pharmacies across the country, but as of Tuesday morning, less than 5 million had been used, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Federal health officials said in December that they plan to vaccinate 20 million Americans before the New Year.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease specialist, described the problems as “some problems”.
“So we are not where we want to be, there is no doubt,” he said on Sunday. “But I think we can do it if we really speed up.”
Snapshots are free, but the federal government has left it up to state officials to decide how to distribute them.
When vaccines arrive at a distribution site, several factors must align. There must be enough freezer space, syringes and health workers to administer the vaccines. More importantly, people need to be screened to be eligible and to indicate when and where to go for their injections – this is where most outages have occurred.
In Houston, where seniors and those aged 16 and over with chronic illnesses are eligible, a dating hotline collapsed after 250,000 people called.
People were asked to register in person at the city’s immunization clinic on Saturday, then call for appointments on Sunday.
“Vehicles lined up at the site early Sunday morning, many without an appointment,” said Scott Packard, a spokesperson for the city’s health department. “We decided to serve the people who were in this line with the remaining nominations instead of turning them down.”
The city set up an online registration on Monday and announced shortly after that no more appointments would be available until the arrival of new vaccines.
Meanwhile, the surrounding Harris County received 6,000 doses and attempted to distribute them through county agencies to teachers and eligible people in nursing homes, homeless shelters and the Jail in the county. But a signup link for those workers crashed after it was leaked on social media last week.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner on Monday vowed to set up a “major mega site” for vaccinations by this Saturday.
In Lee County, Florida, the shots were offered on a first come, first serve basis. Reports showed elderly people lining up at the county health department with lawn chairs, waiting for hours to see if they would make the cut.
In Tampa, the Hillsborough County vaccine registration website crashed minutes after it went live Monday morning. The county now takes reservations by phone only.
Several other counties in Florida use Eventbrite, a website better known for selling concert tickets, to register vaccines. This week, law enforcement has warned of bogus Eventbrite sites that charge seniors for vaccination appointments that don’t exist.
Registering nursing home residents for immunization faces a different challenge: Under federal law, residents or their representatives must give informed consent for any treatment.
“We are seeing a lot of last-minute interference,” said Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, a New York-based advocacy organization. “It really should have been done months ago, when we knew ahead of time that we were hopeful that a vaccine was coming.”
He criticized federal officials for failing to inform long-term care managers of consent requirements.
Under the federal long-term care pharmaceutical partnership program, 429,000 residents of long-term care facilities have received initial doses out of 3.3 million distributed, the CDC reported on Monday.
Meanwhile, in some cases, state and hospital officials are fighting over accusations that unused doses are in health systems.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted that “a significant portion of the vaccines distributed across Texas could be on hospital shelves instead of being given to vulnerable Texans.
Carrie Williams, spokesperson for the Texas Hospital Assn., Disputed this claim, saying “hospitals are changing as fast as humanly possible”.
In New York City, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said hospitals that do not use their supplies within a week of receiving them will be pulled from distribution networks and could be fined $ 100,000.
“We want these vaccines in people’s arms,” he said.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has also threatened to withdraw scheduled shipments from hospitals if they don’t vaccinate faster. Hospitals said they needed more staff to administer the vaccines.
Indeed, many health systems responsible for vaccine distribution are struggling to meet the unprecedented demand for coronavirus testing and patient care amid a sharp rise in infections, according to US surgeon general Jerome Adams.
Another potential reason for this bottleneck is that high priority groups like hospital staff have been unexpectedly suspicious of injections. A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29% of healthcare workers were “reluctant to immunize,” slightly more than the general population, at 27%.
In California, for example, nearly 500 doses were made available to health workers at St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in Red Bluff in Tehama County. The hospital has since referred around 200 of them to the health department.
About 60% of nursing home workers in Ohio have chosen not to get the vaccine. And in Washington, after several first responders missed their appointments, a pharmacist reported a law student buying groceries and offered him a dose to keep him from getting lost – an emergency measure. permitted by local health guidelines.
The slow roll-out does not bode well for hopes of rapidly vaccinating large numbers of people and achieving collective immunity, which experts say is essential to contain the virus.
Johnson, the healthcare consultant, said the situation reminded him of the Obamacare rollout, when the failed Affordable Care Act website threatened to derail the system. The HealthCare.gov website crashed just two hours after it launched in 2013 and could only handle 35,000 visitors at a time.
“How hard is it to design a website, and yet that’s what they crashed into,” Johnson said.
The debacle has undermined confidence in the system and opened an opening for critics – and the same could happen with the COVID-19 vaccine, he said.
“If we’re not effective on deployment, the encouragement to take the vaccine doesn’t carry as much weight,” he said.
Baumgaertner and Kaleem reported from Los Angeles, Hennessy-Fiske from Houston and Read from Seattle.
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