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The record creation of Covid-19 vaccines was a triumph. So why does it take so long to vaccinate Americans?
The answer begins with tens of millions of doses of the Covid-19 vaccine that were not used in medical freezers in the US in the first weeks of launch.
At launch, the federal government reserved far more doses for nursing homes than the facilities needed. A fragmented chain of communication between the federal authorities that dispatched the doses and the local sites that ultimately injected them left vaccinators without knowing how many patients they could schedule. Concerned about limited supplies, some hospitals and health departments withheld doses to ensure they had enough to give second injections to staff or to keep appointments, creating a bottleneck at exit.
Vaccines are getting better now. But early setbacks could spread the pandemic and leave more people unprotected. Health officials say new variants of the coronavirus that seem to spread more easily make vaccine distribution more urgent.
The Trump administration invested heavily in rapid vaccine development, but left the last mile of firing arms at states and localities. That approach resulted in multiple, sometimes contradictory systems, and could not guarantee that local sites had information about the vaccine shipments they needed to quickly administer injections.
