Despite Months To Prep, Why California Lags On COVID Vaccinationhttps://patch.com/california/across-ca/despite-months-prep-why-california-lags-covid-vaccinationAt a press conference on the 19th, the governor assured the public that California has "long been in the vaccination business." That projection of confidence came just three days after the CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced the company would seek the regulatory greenlight for its new COVID-19 vaccine. California, the governor said, would be ready.
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More than three months later, the state is still scrambling to deliver. And the mammoth logistical headache of inoculating a state desperate for a return to pre-pandemic normalcy has become a pressing political one for Newsom. According to the most recent federal data, California is still sitting on 40% of its allotted vaccine, putting it in the bottom third of all 50 states. The messaging also has been hard to decipher, with information from the governor's office sometimes at odds with that being issued by the counties.
With Newsom now facing an increasingly credible recall effort, the slow, sputtering vaccine rollout raises the question: Didn't the state have a plan for this?
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The state's initial distribution framework, which prioritized Californians by occupation group, underlying medical conditions and housing status, may have slowed the process by creating a system that was difficult to administer and hard for the public to understand.
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Jeff Smith, executive officer for Santa Clara County, is one of those critics.
"For the past year, the entire approach that the governor has taken to the pandemic has been disorganized and petulant," said Smith, who disagrees that county governments are sitting on unused vaccine. "Whenever he feels like he's getting bad press, he does something. And the things that he does are not wise things and they're not driven by scientific decisions," said Smith.
There are (at least) two falsehoods in this article. Vaccine doses are not in short supply. ~40% of doses delivered to CA have not been used. Pfizer and Moderna are delivering; CA isn't vaccinating at anywhere near the same pace. Second, the Trump Administration did provide guidance, but even if it didn't, are CA's bureaucrats so blitheringly stupid that they can't figure out things like priorities and distribution pipelines? As for funding, I suspect that claim is also false, but why should the Feds pay for what the states control? The states have no fiscal responsibility for the states' actions (or inactions)?
This article could have offered insight, and there is a little, but it's larded with blame-shifted and excuses for bureaucrats failures to plan for what they knew months in advance was coming. The insights?
1. State mandates are unworkably complex and detailed.
2. State mandates are unworkably inflexible.
