The incoming President is conveying a sense that he wants a bigger and STRONGER effort to get the vaccine shots out to as many Americans as possible to help beat down the rapid ongoing spread of virus infections…
Ok….
They his people do NOT actually become in charge of things for another week…
This plays to health, economic and political worries for Biden & Co.
The Biden admin health people will building something the Trump people never wanted to deal with….(The same issue’s will be encountered across the government as Biden people settle in next week)
Biden has expressed criticism on multiple occasions to groups of transition officials — including one confrontation where Biden conveyed to Covid coordinator Jeff Zients and his deputy, Natalie Quillian, that their team was underperforming.
The tensions have surfaced as Biden’s advisers plan a dramatic scale-up of vaccinations starting Jan. 20, when the incoming team inherits a troubled Trump administration vaccine rollout that has fallen well short of its initial targets.
In interviews, multiple senior transition officials defended Zients and stressed the enormity of the challenge, noting that the Trump administration has refused to share key information for weeks.
Still, the U.S. has conducted around 7 million vaccinations over its first three weeks, well below the million-a-day rate Biden will need to hit. While some Biden advisers insist it’s possible to make good on the 100-million vow, others are privately worried that the federal response is already so chaotic that it will take a herculean effort to pull it off.
Transition officials described encountering a litany of challenges and a lack of long-term planning by the Trump administration, putting them in a hole so deep it could take weeks to get the vaccination campaign on track. They conceded that the team is still working to solve some of the most pressing issues.
“We’re uncovering new information each day, and we’re unearthing — of course — more work to be done,” Vivek Murthy, Biden’s nominee for surgeon general, said in an interview. “We’re in an ongoing process of building the 100 million shots campaign, and we will make that goal work.”
Biden’s aggravation is rooted in the rush to build the foundation for an extended inoculation effort, a complex undertaking that includes untangling all manner of bureaucratic obstacles — from staffing issues to technology problems and insurance coverage dilemmas — that the transition had expected to already be well underway…
image…Drew Angerer/Getty
Surgeon General Resigns at Biden’s Request
“U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams resigned at President-elect Joe Biden’s request on Wednesday, as the incoming president sought to make a symbolic break with his predecessor’s covid-19 response,” the Washington Post reports.