IN DEPTH ANALYSIS: Vaccines were a chance to redeem failures in the U.S. coronavirus response. What went wrong?

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Tue, 2021-01-12 13:43 — mike kraft

Vaccines were a chance to redeem failures in the U.S. coronavirus response. What went wrong? A delayed and disjointed rollout was fueled by political schisms and a decentralized health system. Lena H. Sun, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Frances Stead Sellers, Laurie McGinley, Amy Goldstein, Christopher Rowland, Carolyn Y. Johnson Washington Post

Two promising coronavirus vaccine candidates were speeding through trials in September when the country’s top public health agency invited states to submit plans describing how they would get the shots to millions of people. It was an opportunity, eight months after the United States confirmed its first coronavirus case, to redeem the nation’s devastating failures in organizing a regimen of testing, contact tracing and equipping medical workers with protective gear.

“We have the time to take the lessons learned from the last six months and apply them forward and get it right,” Soumi Saha, a pharmacist and advocate for cost-effective health care, said on that optimistic mid-September day. “The one thing we know for sure is a fragmented approach does not work.”

But that is precisely what the nation got. Health departments and hospital executives are struggling to compensate for decentralized planning, complaining that they were not given enough money to prepare for missions that are becoming increasingly urgent as the coronavirus pandemic reaches new peaks. The United States recorded more than 4,000 covid-19 deaths on a single day last week.

The story of how this happened reflects schisms that have defined the U.S. response, with mistrust smoldering between career scientists and political appointees accountable during an election year to a president widely criticized for his response to the pandemic but who took credit on the stump for vaccine development and promised one would be ready “very soon.” The delayed and disjointed vaccine rollout is the product of poor coordination between the federal government and the 50 states and additional jurisdictions tasked with carrying out the most ambitious immunization campaign in history, likened by officials to the effort to turn back the Nazis in 1944.

With these problems thwarting the rollout, it is clear the United States has not learned from its fractured pandemic response and risks repeating some of the same errors. ...

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