Nope

Posted on: June 3, 2021 at 12:27:48 CT

President Joe Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain criticized the Trump administration’s vaccination campaign as "chaotic," adding Biden will work more closely with states to get vaccines into arms.

"The process to distribute the vaccine, particularly outside of nursing homes and hospitals out into the community as a whole did not really exist when we came into the White House," Klain said.

Many experts said that the Trump administration’s plan had some key holes, including a failure to communicate with the states and cities about the rollout and inadequate funding for vaccine distribution. But it did have a plan: rely on the states.

"The federal plan, much like the rest of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, was very hands off when it comes to details of implementing public health interventions," said Josh Michaud, associate director of global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. "The last mile of vaccine delivery was not a big part of the federal plan by design."

We asked Michael R. Fraser, CEO of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, if the Trump administration had a plan for vaccine distribution.

"It is all in what you mean by ‘plan," Fraser said. "If you mean a tactical guidebook on how to do vaccination from A to Z, no, there is no federal plan."

Prakash Nagarkatti, vice president for research at the University of South Carolina, told USA Today that "there was total lack of planning at the state level for mass vaccination, and the federal government did not help the states overcome the hurdles."

In September, the Trump administration announced a general strategy to distribute the vaccine which included deliveries to states and, later, pharmacy chains. A partnership with CVS and Walgreens administered vaccines in some long-term care facilities.

The closest thing to a federal plan was the playbook the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave states to help them create their own distribution plans.

States wrote broad plans and submitted them in October. They lacked important details , such as how many doses they would get and when. (At the time, no vaccines were approved.)

Biden said that once he took office, he found that the vaccine program was in worse shape than he expected.

The Biden administration has envisioned a more prominent federal role, including setting up 100 vaccine centers across the nation by the end of February. Officials say the biggest roadblock is lack of vaccine supply. Biden announced that his administration aims to purchase enough doses to fully vaccinate 300 million Americans by the end of the summer or beginning of the fall.

The Washington Post reported that Biden’s advisers inherited something "more like a black box than a bare cupboard — the result of fractured communication among federal, state and local officials and a juggling act between manufacturers making a new product and thousands of providers, from big hospital systems to tiny clinics, struggling to plan around an unknown amount of vaccine."

As of Jan. 26, about 20 million people had received their first dose and about 3.5 million had received a second dose, according to the CDC. About 44 million doses had been distributed.