The Trump regime's response to the coronavirus pandemic, or a lack thereof, was to tell states they're on their own. States were forced to compete against each other for critical supplies like masks and other personal protective equipment because there was no unified federal response.
It now looks like that will also be the case with distribution of the first coronavirus vaccines.
States are reportedly being told to find their own deep cold storage solutions for storing and distributing a vaccine.
The Trump administration has earmarked billions in taxpayer dollars to vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer, but these vaccines require ultra-low temperatures -- particularly Pfizer's, housed at an average of 103 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. [...]
The number of medical grade ultra-cold deep freezers in the United States is unknown. And it's up to states to locate them.
"Not all of those (vaccination sites) will have the ultra-cold deep freezers to be able to store vaccines, particularly the Pfizer product," said Jay Butler, CDC deputy director for infectious diseases, during a media briefing Friday. "So that is an important part of the state planning effort to determine where that capacity is."
I was aware that new infrastructure including cold storage would be necessary to store vaccines, but I was not aware before reading this report that it would require a specific kind of rare and expensive freezer.
It's preposterous that states are once again being forced to scrounge for something as crucial as this and it means our response will continue to be uneven at best. And not in the way the Trump regime may think.
If you live in a large liberal city like New York, for example, this is probably not going to be a significant problem. But what about everyone else? What about people in small towns or even medium sized cities? The chances that they will have this kind of storage available do not seem very high especially if they're competing with other cities and states for limited supplies just as they did at the onset of the pandemic.
The first vaccine may be only 50 to 60 percent effective and it may be logistically impossible to distribute it for a large number of Americans.
Trump is going to fuck this up one way or another and that's even if he's voted out next month. He may intentionally fuck it up if he loses.