In the final days of the Trump regime, officials quietly admitted that a reserve of about 20 million doses of coronavirus vaccines had already been depleted and distributed to states.
States that announced plans to vaccinate a wider range of people had to cancel or delay their plans when the news broke, but they also never actually received or used the vaccines that were supposedly stockpiled.
Politico reported on Saturday that no one knows what actually happened to the reserve because the Trump regime literally wasn't tracking the shipments.
It was not until after Biden was sworn in that the Covid response team discovered the system was blinded to much of the route that vaccines traveled from the government's distribution hubs to people's arms.
Instead, once the vaccine shipments are delivered to the states, responsibility for tracking them has been left up to states’ individual public health systems. The administration then only gets an update once the doses are actually administered and an official record is submitted.
Biden administration sources told Politico that they expect about 2 million out of the 20 million doses will show up in the coming weeks as states report more injections, but that leaves 18 million that are lost in the wind.
I don't know if this is simply one of the greatest acts of incompetence of all time or something more nefarious, but it's difficult for me to imagine that at least some of the missing vaccines haven't gone into the hands of scalpers. It's possible that the difficulty of storing the vaccine at ultra low temperatures would prevent that, but criminals can be very resourceful.
In any case, it's clear that once the Biden administration took over, they found that anything that could have been handled poorly certainly was handled poorly. I feel like it takes extra effort to be as careless and inept as the regime was.