Operation Warped Speed: COVID-19 vaccine rollout at a snail’s pace

Remember how we were supposed to have 20 million people getting their first COVID-19 vaccine shot by the end of the month?

No, that ain’t happening.

The CDC says today that 2.1 million Americans have received their first shot, and that 11.4 million doses of the vaccines have been distributed to the states.

Which means: we’ve only distributed 57 percent of the vaccine that we’d said would already be shot into arms by Thursday, and completed the first dosages for roughly 10.5 percent.

A lot has been done wrong the past nine months.

This is just simple logistics.

We’d already gotten indications here in Virginia that Operation Warp Speed, as the Trump administration, on its way out the door into the dustbin of history, dubbed its operation, wasn’t working.

Back on Dec. 18, the Virginia Department of Health reported that it had been informed that the state’s allocation of COVID-19 vaccine doses would be less than initially planned for several weeks.

We were originally supposed to get 480,000 doses by the end of the month; we were told to expect closer to, eh, 370,000.

The VDH says today that it’s received to date 285,725.

Still short 85,000 from the revised downward total.

As of today, we’ve vaccinated 47,052 people.

VDH estimates that there are 500,000 Virginians in the top priority vaccination group – healthcare workers and long-term care facility residents.

There’s a lot that has been unacceptable in the government response to COVID-19.

We’ve been told that the way out is the vaccines.

It’s not enough to spend billions on making them.

They have to actually get into people’s arms.

The countdown is on: just three more weeks of this utter lack of basic management, administration, attention to detail, respect for our fellow man.

Story by Chris Graham