Nothing to re-work: Biden team will have to use their own plan
By Kenny Stancil, staff writer
for Common
Dreams
"There is nothing for us to
rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch," one source
with knowledge of the Biden team's pandemic response told CNN.
With more
than 406,000 people having died from Covid-19 in the U.S.
alone, and with seven-day averages of nearly 200,000 cases and
more than 3,000 deaths per day, Biden has pledged to ramp up the production and
distribution of vaccines—vowing to inoculate 100 million
Americans in the first 100 days of his administration.
But the failure of the Trump
administration to leave behind any national rollout plans has made that task
more challenging. Describing the moment when it dawned on Biden's team
that there was no vaccine strategy for them to build upon, another source told CNN: "Wow, just
further affirmation of complete incompetence."
Along with many others, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) noted how unsurprising the news was, considering the Trump administration's penchant for dishonesty—including previous lies about vaccine distribution.
Biden's advisers had endured hostility from the Trump
administration during the transition, but according to Jeff Zients, coordinator
of the White House's Covid-19 task force, "What we're inheriting from the
Trump administration is so much worse than we could have imagined."
"We don't have the visibility
that we would hope to have into supply and allocations," Zients said.
The Daily Beast reported Thursday that as the Biden
administration "begin[s] to strategize on how best to remedy the
situation they are finding that the foundation on which the Trump
administration built its vaccine distribution program is more flawed than
previously understood... From the accounting to the way vaccines are allocated
and scheduled for delivery—the system doesn't allow for the quick movement of
vaccines off the manufacturing line to state vaccine distribution points."
According to reporting from CNN,
"Biden's Covid advisers had wanted to be careful not to be overly
critical in public of the Trump administration's handling of the virus and
vaccine, given that the Biden transition team was already having a hard time
getting critical information and cooperation from the outgoing
administration."
"Now that the transition of
power has taken place, the Biden administration is hoping that they can quickly
start to get a clearer picture of where things actually stand with vaccine
distribution and administration across the country, going through something of
a 'fact-checking' exercise on what exactly the Trump administration had and had
not done," CNN noted.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday,
Zients said that "for almost a year now,
Americans could not look to the federal government for any strategy, let alone
a comprehensive approach to respond to Covid. And we've seen the tragic costs
of that failure."
"That'll change" now that
Biden is in office, he added.