Live in NY and have been tracking the slow jab rate with disappointment to now find we are running up against inventory&deliveries now. Though our daily jabs have gone from appallingly low to only embarrassingly low, we are actually going to go backwards now that it turns out the “strategic reserve” Trump promised to release last week is a phantom.
Being under-40 with no kids or seniors in my home, easily working from home, I expect to get vax sometime this summer. This is fine, I’m happy to let seniors, medical and frontline workers get it first. This of course includes teachers so they can open schools for good come August.
Glad to see it’s been opened to most of these prioritized people now, and it is intelligent to have a mix of appointments & walk-ins to take out the excess inventory daily.
That said, the whole distribution is a shitshow. And this started even before it moved beyond initial phase of medical workers getting it at work from their employers. I know a lot of non-patient facing people in medical or medical-adjacent jobs who got it well before most nurses, EMTs, etc got it. It seems if you are in management or have a PHD you could jump all the way to the front.. of course.
I don't live in NY so I am curious. NY is one of the worst hit states in the country and had 8 months to prepare for this. What do you think went wrong?
Is it local/state officials' colossal incompetence, something that they are quite known for? For a state with one of the highest tax rates, you would expect better from them.
The constant infighting between de Blasio and Cuomo certainly isn't helping things. Cuomo has a very "my way or the highway" style of management but then doesn't release details fast enough for there to be an effective ground game, so individual institutions or counties are stuck to do their own planning.
At least there's a somewhat-coherent PR response, but that doesn't help get jabs in arms.
I think you have 2 factors.
Governor Cuomo & Mayor DeBlasio hate each other.
BdB is all rhetoric and mildly incompetent but means well.
Cuomo is a very clever political machine, and doesn’t want BdB to get any wins.
Additionally there’s a lot of state vs local control issues for NYC where NYC either doesn’t have authority or the authority is nebulous so Cuomo can claim things aren’t BdB’s call.
There have been numerous times during the pandemic where BdB called for something like closing schools, etc where Cuomo issued a stinging rebuke and then made the call himself 2-3 days later.
Secondly, this is a national issue.
As much as NY is a basket case.. the state by state stats are quite similar. Depending on the week NY is outperforming lots of states in the vax distribution. Relative to Feds, State governments are not that big and do not have a lot of idle capacity. Whatever idle capacity we did have has been taken out by PPE distribution, testing roll out and dealing with all the sick.
Realistically this is a FEMA/NatGuard issue at this point. We can’t expect to have any nurse capacity for vax considering hospitals are all full. It’s a shame there was no planning for that in advance, but par for the course with DJT.
Fortunately it sounds like Biden is going to pull the trigger on that in first 100 days.
I don't understand why you think the states shouldn't be able to handle this. It's their responsibility.
How is the federal government supposed to magically increase hospital capacity? Nobody ever wanted to pay for a bunch more idle and unused hospital capacity. It's a pandemic with lots of victims, you do the best you can, and that's how it goes.
And if NY is a basket case (I'm not arguing) the federal government may be even more so. They don't exactly have a good record of responding to emergencies, either.
> Being under-40 with no kids or seniors in my home, easily working from home, I expect to get vax sometime this summer. This is fine, I’m happy to let seniors, medical and frontline workers get it first. This of course includes teachers so they can open schools for good come August.
I'd probably pay $29.95 per month to participate in a social network where the average comment is as normal as this paragraph.
Call it sensiblepeoplewhowearmasks.com or perhaps lowerbloodpressure.org
The “strategic reserve” falsely reported to not exist is stored at the manufactures:
“Pfizer Inc has been holding on to second doses for each of its COVID-19 vaccinations at the request of the federal government and anticipates no problems supplying them to Americans, a spokeswoman said in a statement on Friday.
Pfizer’s comments run counter to a report in the Washington Post that the federal government ran down its vaccine reserve in late December and has no remaining reserves of doses on hand.”
The reporting was about things that Alex Azar said. Is he just stupid and doesn't understand what everyone else is talking about? Here's the article where he is quoted saying there is no Federal reserve:
If Pfizer is indeed storing the doses at the request of the government, something stupid is going on, because it is reasonable to call that a Federal stockpile.
I'm also happy to wait. I just want my parents and older relatives (all 75+) vaccinated sooner than later. That will make me worry less. If for some reason I can get an appointment sooner, I'll obviously take it, but I'm not counting on it. Unless the pace really picks up it's going to be a while...
Being under-40 with no kids or seniors in my home, easily working from home, I expect to get vax sometime this summer. This is fine, I’m happy to let seniors, medical and frontline workers get it first. This of course includes teachers so they can open schools for good come August.
Glad to see it’s been opened to most of these prioritized people now, and it is intelligent to have a mix of appointments & walk-ins to take out the excess inventory daily.
That said, the whole distribution is a shitshow. And this started even before it moved beyond initial phase of medical workers getting it at work from their employers. I know a lot of non-patient facing people in medical or medical-adjacent jobs who got it well before most nurses, EMTs, etc got it. It seems if you are in management or have a PHD you could jump all the way to the front.. of course.