I have nominated 2020 as being the worse year of my life. I am going to surmise that most of my fellow Americans will agree it was their worst year also.
The biggest surprise was not the pandemic itself. It was not the economic impact either. Nor was it how many Americans either overreacted or played down the seriousness of what we faced. No, the biggest surprise was how inept our national and state governments have become in solving the nation’s most pressing problems.
From the roll out of testing, to not being able to contact trace, or just providing reliable and consistent statistics, we were let down. The one bright spot in all of this was the rapidity of making so many different vaccines to combat Covid. That success was due to allowing the private sector to do what it does best. We unleashed a market response because governments throughout the world committed to buy hundreds of millions of doses. That gave the companies the incentive to move fast.
We should be celebrating because the hard scientific part is done. However, Washington does not have a realistic plan to administer the vaccine to the American people. The national government’s petty and ridiculous excuse that vaccine administration is to be handled at the state level shows how completely incompetent the current administration is.
Florida has a public health department that is completely underfunded and inadequate to even coordinate a plan for administering the vaccine never mind inoculating 21 million people. Earlier this week, the Martin County branch of the Florida Department of Public Health said it had the vaccine and advised residents to call a phone number to get on the list. Of course, they were overwhelmed and fully subscribed for their 500 doses probably before the phone number was even made public.
Cleveland Clinic issued a statement that it would begin giving out the vaccine to its patients. The term “patient” in this instance means most of the county since many health care practices are part of their network. Even though my primary care doctor is not, when I went to their My Chart portal, I was considered a patient because of my interaction with specialists who are participating members of their network. All my medications were listed. This is modern medicine!
The reason I went to their portal was because when my wife called to see about the vaccine originally, the voice message said appointments would be done through the portal. Brilliant, I thought. That brilliancy did not last long. Within an hour, they too gave a phone number to call. However, a busy signal greeted me every time.
Here we are in the third decade of the 21st century and we are supposed to use an invention of the 19th century to schedule our appointments. When I want to see my doctor, I go online for an appointment and do the same to schedule an appointment for bloodwork at the lab. But I would suspect that neither Cleveland Clinic nor the Department of Health had enough doses at this point to make much of an impact. It is all for show as so much of American life has become.
Where is the government in all this? Well, it looks like they are lost in space. American public health was once the envy of the world. Those agencies were instrumental in eradicating typhus. New York’s system gave me the polio vaccine and then the booster. It was not “welfare.” It was something that government did to provide for its citizens.
Somehow in the last 40 years, we have lost sight of the purpose for government. It is not only to protect us from foreign invasion. Government should be a problem solver. It should provide for the overall good of its people.
Every county and many cities have trained EMTs and paramedics on their payrolls. Give them the vaccines to administer at the local fire house. Cleveland Clinic and the pharmaceutical chains do not need to be cut out of the loop. The more the better.
The new administration should do everything to ramp up production and distribution including using the military to transport and administer the vaccine. If we want to get the economy back for all Americans, administer the vaccine. Let us make sure that our primary care providers have it so that they can get shots in arms.
America’s newest threat to the vaccine rollout is that apparently millions of already manufactured doses may expire before they can be administered. We have come so far in a year to see this precious product tossed in the dumpster. How many millions of Americans will get the virus instead of the vaccine to prevent it?
courtesy of Etsi
As a nation, we need to stop seeing government as the enemy. That sentiment is especially aimed at the many politicians who, while being on the public payroll for years, do nothing to make our institutions better. We need leaders who are not afraid to use the power of government to solve problems instead of crying that the problems are insolvable or to blame someone else for their incompetence.