Two hundred thirty-eight million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been distributed, but only 184 million have been injected into people, according to Paul Mango, former Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of Health and Human Services, who helped administer Operation Warp Speed under President Donald J. Trump.
So, more than 50 million doses are sitting idle in refrigerators and storage facilities across the nation, but not being administered.
Meanwhile, Americans are dying at a rate of 700 per day (as of April 6th) and the virus is infecting upwards of 60,000 people daily.
Some states are doing a good job of administering the shots and others are not.
According to Mango, under Trump each state got a weekly allocation of shots. Any that were not administered at the end of the week were re-allocated to other states that were meeting their quotas.
But, Joe Biden stopped that policy and let states dawdle, not using their allocation while their citizens were infected and died.
Among major states, as of April 10th, these were the percentages of their citizens who had been fully inoculated:
1. Connecticut = 26.5
2. New Jersey = 25.2
3. Massachusetts = 24.4
4. New York = 24.1
5. Pennsylvania = 21.7
6. Michigan = 21.8
7. Ohio = 21.6
8. North Carolina = 20.7
9. Florida = 20.5
10. California = 20.1
11. Texas =19.0
12. Georgia = 15.0
Biden should immediately restore the Trump policy and re-allocate the vaccines to states that are using them aggressively.
Not only will this assure that shots are being administered as fast as they can be produced, but it will create an incentive for the laggards to inoculate more people.
Biden has little enough to do with mitigating the pandemic after Trump’s people developed, tested, and approved the vaccines.
All he has to do is shoot them into arms. And he can’t even get that right.
Dick Morris is former presidential advisor and political strategist. He is a regular contributor to Newsmax TV. Read Dick Morris's Reports — More Here.
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