Yesterday I wrote about my somewhat haphazard experience with getting the covid-19 vaccine, and you responded with stories of your own. It was a good thread.
The Biden administration is desperate to ramp up the distribution of COVID-19 vaccine. But officials working with the White House’s coronavirus task force are running into a major problem: the data they need to track the delivery of doses is incomplete, often late, and sometimes even contradictory.
Without a reliable accounting system, the administration is essentially flying blind, instead relying on hundreds of local anecdotes about issues with supply and low vaccination rates, according to three officials working with the White House’s COVID-19 task force. That makes it much more difficult to piece together a cohesive picture of a national problem with life-or-death consequences. Some vaccine vials lost in the system could hold as many as six or seven people doses. And there are millions of doses unaccounted for, officials say.
Read the whole article. It’s much worse than I thought. I am sure that a civil servant in FEMA, CDC, or some other federal agency has the software and expertise to build a tracking system, but the Trumpies didn’t want that.
Open thread!
Open Thread: John Kerry, Gina McCarthy, President Biden Live
Old School
Here’s hoping they show up!
piratedan
whocouldda node that not having a national disbursement plan and leaving all states as opposing consumers could be so screwed up? It’s a mystery I tells ya.
The Biden Admin is likely having to repair the damage of getting all the states asking the same questions and having that reported to the CDC and any other relevant federal agency.
I can almost guarantee you that not every state is asking the same questions of each patient for testing, and not every community has the means to effectively perform contact tracing of the diagnostic test itself, so expectations that people would have their shit together and handle the vaccination distribution would be… disingenuous… Guy’s been on the job for a week, its gonna take some time to impose some order into the system… and that’s just presuming that there aren’t people lurking in the weeds fucking things up just because they can…
Major Major Major Major
Having no plan is a bad plan, and the Biden administration does seem like they’re developing a good plan, but i don’t know if I’d pin my hopes on an underpaid Oracle administrator somewhere in FEMA ?
Does anybody know more about what Biden is doing to help Pfizer make more vaccine? I know he’s using the DPA for vials and stuff but I think i read the ultimate bottleneck is some fancy chemistry stuff that nobody knows how to make at scale because we just invented it? (I am very obviously not any sort of chemist)
Martin
A lot of the gaps in the strategy are filling in, but the approval for children expected in about a month is key. If they can secure enough supply when that approval comes in, you start to ship to schools and you’ll get a population of 60 million people you can vaccinate very quickly and efficiently.
rikyrah
Oh, they are accounted for. In someone’s bank account.
satby
That chaos was deliberate and probably intensified after the trumpists lost the election. Wonder how many “missing” doses went to places that greased Jared’s palm.
I see rikyrah and I are on the same page.
Patricia Kayden
boatboy_srq
@Major Major Major Major: With Merck’s own vaccine entry proving a very damp squib, their capacity might be available to boost production. Provided Pfizer or Moderna lets them have the recipe…
jonas
Sigh. Just like with fucking PPE in the early months of the pandemic. The amount of unfucking things Biden’s people have to deal with…
In other news, I finally got a vaccine appointment now again: a regional hospital ended up with some extra doses they needed to get rid of, so the state let them open up a couple of hundred extra spots this weekend and I snagged one. Last time was a false alarm — here’s hoping this works out!
rikyrah
I hope that people do not start blaming their states.
The states were lied to.
Of course, if you live in a Red State, why don’t you check where your vaccine has gone.
Is it like Texas and Florida, where the richer, Whiter areas, who were in the forefront of the ‘ open the economy/it’s all a hoax’ – have gotten the vaccine…
while other areas where COVID has ravaged the populations…can’t get vaccine…
Looking at you, you rotten azz muthaphucka Greg Abbott of Texas, when people in the county around Dallas saw the imbalance, tried to steer the vaccine to those who had been disproportionately afflicted with COVID, and his evil azz threatened to strip the county of vaccine – now THAT SHYT, the Feds need to come in an investigate.
Same thing in Florida.
You can call me suspicious. You can call me tinfoil hat wearing. But, I will always believe that Dolt45 had it set up that he would throw the vaccine to the Red States, and let them dole it out the way they wanted, with no Federal oversite.
Gravenstone
@Old School: Nonviable if they’ve gotten warm. They’re likely garbage
eta: I see I’m not remotely cynical enough. I am suitably ashamed.
matt the semi-reasonable
They wanted to use vaccine distribution for leverage, like everything else.
They’re corrupt garbage, and the Republican Party is also corrupt garbage. You can think of them like an organized crime syndicate/terrorist group that’s using its proceeds to finance a revolution.
matt the semi-reasonable
@Major Major Major Major: In my company all hands today the medical leadership said that the vials only last 6 hours once they’re opened, so all 10 doses in a vial have to be used in that window. This seriously complicates administering the vaccine.
Gravenstone
@boatboy_srq: Saw this morning that Sanofi is stepping up to assist production of the Astra/Zenica vaccine, so other pharma houses can do likewise. And proprietary information is just a confidentiality agreement (not a trivial undertaking, but they’re common in the industry) away.
artem1s
Does anyone doubt this was by design, not just incompetence? That the Traitor Tots were selling them off to the highest bidders? The insurrection isn’t the only reason the GOPers want us to ‘move on’ and forget what happened in the last administration.
Martins: [on the ferris wheel] Have you ever seen any of your victims?
Harry: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. [gestures to people far below] Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.
Haroldo
@rikyrah:
@satby:
I hope you’ll have room for three on the page.
Milo Minderbinder made flesh is our Jared.
Served
If Johnson & Johnson’s results next week come through, it will be a godsend. I have been very lucky, and have been able to manage fairly well through the past year of isolation, but imagining another lost year is pushing me to a breaking point.
Barbara
I am somewhat flummoxed because I thought that they were going to use an existing vaccine distribution contract as the pipeline for the vaccine. I think the vendor was McKesson. I mean, every controlled product in the U.S. is supposed to go through secure tracking and tracing. If they used that distribution contract, the vendor should know where things ended up. This is insane.
J R in WV
@boatboy_srq:
I suspect the Defense Production Act means the Feds can force Pfizer And Moderna to work with Merck to produce additional quantities of vaccine pronto!
Perhaps with the proviso that Pfizer/Moderna can always produce that additional quantity of vaccine themselves, however they can. While the recipe for making the stuff is somewhat valuable, the real crown jewel is how they designed and developed the vaccines themselves.
Ksmiami
@Major Major Major Major: if only there was some sort of qsr logistics software from international fast food giants that could be adapted Quickly- I mean how many egg McMuffins are sold everyday???
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: At some point the vaccines need to get full FDA approval, not just emergency authorization. When that happens, it’ll be possible for employers or school systems to mandate that people get the vaccines. Right now they can’t.
White & Gold Purgatorian
What a mess! I agree with rikyrah at #5 that some of this “loss” is deliberate graft and corruption .
On a more positive note, my Mom’s pharmacy called this afternoon to ask if she wants the Moderna vaccine this Friday. On Monday we were ecstatic to finally get her appointments for the Pfizer shot from a local hospital. But she won’t need to get out of the car at the pharmacy, so we are going with that and will cancel the other appointment. The odd thing is this is a local independent pharmacy, not CVS, Walgreens, Walmart or any of the big names. Maybe someone is finally getting a plan here in Alabama.
Old School
@Gravenstone:
Maybe they are in the spare deep freezer in the pocket of the other coat that hasn’t been worn in a few weeks.
Or maybe it’s just an inventory error and the vaccines never existed is the first place.
rikyrah
@jonas:
Congrats! Crossing everything for you.
Cheryl Rofer
@Major Major Major Major: @Ksmiami: Project management software should be able to do this. It’s not black magic.
And “an underpaid Oracle administrator somewhere in FEMA” could do a better job than this. And I’m sure that not all the project managers left, who would be better than an Oracle administrator.
cope
Certainly the states are compounding the chaos. Here in Florida, my own very forward thinking county (Seminole) has seen its supply cut in half each week for the past three weeks. In their weekly presser yesterday, they explained that they cannot commit to making any more appointments for vaccines. Our governor and his lackeys seem intent on privatizing the vaccination process by outsourcing the program to Publix, a regional supermarket chain and supporter of Republican politicians.
Health officials in my county don’t know for a fact that the doses they have had cut are going to Publix so they cannot reassure people that this is the case and tell them they just have to make plans to vaccinate in select grocery stores with pharmacies. In point of fact, when I last looked at where Publix is administering vaccinations, my county was not included.
I am selfishly glad that my wife and I took advantage of the good infrastructure for reserving and getting vaccines that our county implemented and the fact that I am tech-savvy enough to have done so but those behind us are not so lucky. We are also lucky that Seminole County won’t give you the first jab unless they already have the second one on hand so we are getting our second shots this Saturday at the county’s designated location.
rikyrah
This story from Tennessee:
The Associated Press and Kaiser Health News contributed to this report.
Brett Kelman is the health care reporter for The Tennessean. He can be reached at 615-259-8287 or at brett.kelman@ tennessean.com.
satby
@Matt McIrvin: I say that every morning on the covid updates thread.
jimmiraybob
I’d start a systematic search of Trump properties.
Shalimar
@rikyrah: This has to be what happened. West Virginia somehow has many times the doses that 4 times as populous Maryland has. Florida seems to have as many as DeSantis wants. Trump administration rewarded supporters and punished opponents, and the terrible record-keeping was intentional to make it hard to prove.
Matt McIrvin
@Shalimar: I looked for a pattern like that but it seems to be far more random. West Virginia and Alaksa have a (relative) lot of vaccine, but so, apparently, do New Mexico and Connecticut, which are not Trumpy states. It’s all over the place.
narya
I wish they would use FQHCs to help distribute vaccinations. They’ve been surveying us every week regarding testing (tests, positives, and now vaccinations), so they have another source for info. And they’ve given us piles of CARES act money–more to specifically vaccinate people would be fine, AND FQHCs are meant to serve people who face barriers to health care, i.e., we’re already serving folks who are harder hit by this.
J R in WV
@Barbara:
No, this isn’t insane, this is carefully planned and criminal~!!~
But since the approval of vaccines, every death should be a murder indictment for all the people controlling this deliberate cluster-fuck. No inventory? Criminal!!
If there’s a witness to the theft of federally held vaccine, the sale, loss, or transfer of federally held vaccine, people should be jailed for the murder of a human for every dose sold, transferred, or lost. If it got warm and no longer works, that counts as murder too.
This wasn’t stupid or insane, this was intentional criminal behavior. Creating the most valuable substance on Earth with no inventory control is contrary to every day commercial activity!!! There are probably a hundred thousand people working for the Federal government who could have created a high-end inventory system with scanners and bar codes in a couple of weeks. This isn’t secret squirrel genius stuff, this is every day commercial activity for every pharmacy, every distributor, every manufacturer of ASPIRIN, let alone the most valuable substance on the planet!!!
I am outraged. Criminal behavior in the White House… Jared was in charge, arrest him first!
DaveInCO
Another factor is materials sourcing. Bringing other companies into the loop won’t address that issue. From a couple of weeks ago in SciAm: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-covid-vaccines-need-absurd-amounts-of-material-and-labor1/
Elie
@J R in WV:
You got that right — CRIMINAL I knew those Trump mofos would rip this off. I bet most of the “disappeared” doses are on the black market or in Russia. What do you bet? They need to get the FBI in on this asap while they can still capture some of the doses and the criminals making off with it… I knew that they would do this! Didn’t you?
jonas
This was part of the problem back in December when the first doses starting being delivered — General Perna claimed that the government was initially relying on some test or dummy figures in the system to schedule allotments to the states before realizing that they weren’t the actual shipment figures coming from Pfizer. That’s a mistake up there with the time that NASA lost a Martian probe because some engineers at JPL forgot to convert some metric figures to imperial (or vice-versa — I forget) in calculating the landing craft’s approach.
Aleta
Good thing we won the election. There should be a 2nd Thanksgiving holiday for deliverance from the Trump administration.
Shalimar
@cope: I saw a story last week. Vaccine available at roughly 16% of Publixes in Florida. Every single one of the 110+ Publixes that have it are in a county that voted for DeSantis.
Cheryl from Maryland
My husband (pre-existing condition of renal failure) just got approval from Montgomery, Co, MD to pre-register for the vaccine. Since GOP governor Hogan hates MoCo and has been sending the County less vaccine, we anticipate at least 4 weeks for my spouse’s vaccine. His 97 year old mother in Fairfax, VA is in senior living and has heard nothing about a vaccine. People like us are looking to Biden et. al. For improvement.
wjs
Folks, if it looks like this system was designed so that vaccines could be skimmed off the top and distributed to business associates of Jared Kushner, just note that elections have consequences and handing America over to an international crime syndicate probably wasn’t a good idea but you already knew that.
jonas
Yeah, but remember that time the Obamacare website was slow and didn’t work right for a few weeks? So both sides….
rikyrah
@Martin:
If a school system can’t promise that every adult in the building has been vaccinated – they have no business opening schools back up for children.
We are having this problem in Chicago, and I am ALL IN with the Teachers Union. They service the groups most affected by COVID-19. No teacher should have to risk their lives RIGHT NOW. Vaccinate all adults, and then open the schools.
I understand that kids are hurting. My Peanut is hurting. She really does need to be in a physical school setting. But, she is ALIVE. And, all the adults around her are still ALIVE (saying prayers). That’s more important to me.
Talk to me in September about kids going back.
wjs
@Cheryl from Maryland: NYTimes Columnist Tom Friedman, a MoCo resident, was whining on Twitter this past week about how he can’t figure out where to get his elite rear end vaccinated and didn’t seem to know Hogan was still the governor.
Imagine that.
Barbara
@J R in WV: You have more faith in the organizational abilities of Trump henchmen than I do.
CarolPW
Got my first shot today (eastern Washington state). Started out looking like a clusterfuck but wasn’t bad. Got confirmation 10 days ago that I was eligible to get vaccinated. Made an appointment Monday for a Tuesday 1:54 pm time slot at the Benton County fairgrounds. Saw in the paper Monday afternoon that the fairground staff weren’t able to access the on-line appointments. Got an email Monday night that they had overbooked Tuesday, and to come in Wednesday between 8:30 and 11:00 am.
Arrived at 8:30 and joined a long line of cars. Got the shot from a nice young National Guardsman at 10:00. Waited in a line of cars with people regularly checking up on us for 15 minutes and came home. Everyone we spoke to during the process was very happy to talk to the dog, and nearly all of them asked if she got her shot too.
cope
@Shalimar: My county, Seminole, went blue for the first time since Truman. Coincidence?
VeniceRiley
@narya: I also work for a very large FQHC & PACE and can confirm. We are awaiting 2nd shipments but were savvy enough to hold our booster doses.
I too wonder if Jared sold the first lot off and everything after that was from the reserves lot. Remember the late start?
Elie
@Barbara:
All they had to do was make sure that data on doses produced would never be validatable in the data that the states had. Easy enough. No effort is made to tie or reconcile numbers by date. It should have been easy as pie but of course, if you want to make some doses disappear, you actually don’t want to synchronize or match numbers. So seeming incompetence is by design….
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: It is indeed all over the place, and I suspect at least part of that is because there’s no national standard for record gathering and reporting for lots of things COVID-19 related. E.g. I’ve harped on the fact that Virginia does not report “recovered” numbers, so if you look at Ohio and Virginia on Worldometers.info, it looks like 3/4+ of the people who ever got COVID in Virginia is still infected, while 3/4+ in Ohio are recovered. Which makes no sense. Until there’s uninform reporting, “active infections” numbers aren’t meaningful (in an absolute sense – changes might be, maybe).
Similarly, BlueVirginia:
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
One of the big early tasks of the Biden people is figuring out what data they need, how to make it uniform across the country, and how to get it in a timely manner. I suspect they’re making rapid progress on that as we speak, but it’s a big job.
Cheers,
Scott.
citizen dave
@wjs: I agree that Tom Friedman is the worst (learned that here), but CBS newsguy/kinda historian John Dickerson pointed out it may have been a joke callback to the Truman administration…seriously. Here are the two tweets:
Thomas L. Friedman @tomfriedman
Jan 25
Does anyone have any idea where 65-year-olds and older can get vaccinated against Covid in Maryland? They opened the category today and told people NOTHING about where to go. None of this would be happening if Larry Hogan were governor.
John Dickerson @jdickerson
Jan 25
To those rightly pointing out that Hogan is governor, it’s likely this is an updated version of a joke from the Truman administration. None of this would be happening if Truman were president. An Eisenhower variant was that if Sherman Adams dies, Ike will have to become president
Aleta
@Elie: I’ve been thinking Middle East, just cause Kushner recently made a trip there.
cain
It’s my observation that states like mine have had a relatively slow roll out compared to red states.
Just Some Fuckhead
@citizen dave: I’m going to give that six months and see if it gets funny.
The Moar You Know
Largest logistics agency in the world is the DLA – Defense Logistics Agency. This would be child’s play for them. Maybe somebody should call them or send an email or something.
bluefoot
@Major Major Major Major: There are basically two companies in the world who can make the right lipids at scale needed for the vaccines, and a small number that can make the enzyme needed for the correct RNA modifications for the mRNA to be stable. It’s hard to understate how new all this is. It’s one thing to be able to make reagents that can be used on the benchtop (i.e. research grade and scale), but a whole other thing entirely to make large scale, pure stuff for manufacturing something you can inject into people.
And even if you have all the right ingredients, actually making the vaccine, testing each batch to make sure it’s good, and then putting into vials for distribution is hard. Once it looked like mRNA vaccines might work (last summer), the Trump administration should have started putting things in place, because it can take months to years to spin up a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility even for vanilla chemistry, much less new technology.
WaterGirl
@Patricia Kayden: I skimmed the article. My question is this: has the number of people answering that they are Republican gone down?
Has the actual number of people who still like him gone up, gone down, or stayed the same?
Starboard Tack
In the W.H. COVID Response Team briefing today, Andy Slavik had a slide showing 47M doses delivered and 24M administered so far. They couldn’t say exactly where the unadministered doses are.
Another Scott
@The Moar You Know: Is this a Friedman joke??
Gen. Gustave Perna was the COO of Warp Speed:
Maybe vaccine logistics should be headed by someone who actually does vaccine logistics??
Cheers,
Scott.
Cheryl from Maryland
@wjs: Tom Friedman is a useless ass. Maybe he should ask a cabdriver where to get a vaccine.
Just Some Fuckhead
I was thinking today how lucky Trump was to have four really stupid kids because if they were normal intelligence they’d be deeply ashamed of him.
bluefoot
@J R in WV: It was absolutely criminal behavior on the part of the Trump administration. My understanding is that the now-infamous pandemic preparedness plan from the Obama administration did have vaccine distribution outlined, but of course Jared et al tossed the plan and the infrastructure.
As for tracking, well, you’ll recall that the Trump administration trashed the well-established CDC reporting pipeline and replaced with some shoddy system made by some Trump-friendly company. There really is no definitive disease reporting system for COVID cases in the US right now. So I imagine any legacy vaccine tracking system was likewise trashed by Trump.
Another Scott
@bluefoot: I haven’t checked recently, but wasn’t the Gates Foundation going to show us how wonderful it was to let them sit on $35+B since they were going to spend some of it build factories for vaccines as soon as candidates were ready??
WEForum.
Gee. I wonder what happened, what with their “deep expertise in infectious disease” and billions, and so forth… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
sab
@rikyrah: My city’s schools did not reopen, but the school board changed its mind and did reopen football. I can just imagine how pleasant it is in a three generation household if grandkid wants to play and grandma is afraid for her life.
I have made a note of how those board members voted, so I will remember at the next election.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
I don’t doubt that shitforbrains wanted to fuck up the delivery, especially to states/areas that wouldn’t and didn’t bow and scrape to him, or were very vocal about him not being despot for life.
But I never overlook just plain total incompetence when discussing anything having to do with shitforbrains or his minions. The point about how big the problem(s) are in making distribution work with these vaccines, temperature of storage, arrangement of arms by sixes, who to vaccinate in what order, who pays for the vaccines and the delivery and on and on and on. None of the people involved at the top had any real desire to succeed, or any real desire to give a damn about the consequences of failure, to be blunt they didn’t/don’t give a fuck about anyone other than themselves or their bank accounts.
bluefoot
@Another Scott: Heh. The Gates Foundation has deep expertise in infectious disease, but it’s concentrated in people who assess and partner with companies and organizations who do the actual work. I have friends who work at some Gates Foundation partners (in infectious disease and elsewhere). Gates basically provides money, government pull, and acts as a broker/facilitator.
There’s pretty much no way to build, validate, put through QA/QC a new manufacturing facility that fast. Months to years with unlimited resources. And that doesn’t count the months to actually transfer, validate, etc the specific manufacturing process from one company to another. I’ve done it for drugs I’ve worked on, for fairly straightforward chemistry and formulation. Even with the best people and tons of money, it takes *time*.
Roger Moore
@cope:
Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Publix primarily serves better off white areas and has a negligible presence in poorer and predominantly black areas.
Cheryl Rofer
Doesn’t seem to include immunizations, but the Biden people are making the state data on cases, etc., as transmitted to the federal government, generally available.
Ruckus
@bluefoot:
People rarely see how much effort it takes to scale up a business. I’ve run 2 very small companies and watched others try to scale up similar businesses. There are so many steps and each one builds on the prior steps. Get a step wrong and it all goes wonky, at the least. I just watched a video about Arrival, the company making electric vans for UPS and electric busses. Their products and manufacturing processes allow them to build many very small factories rather than one huge factory. Less cost per factory, less time to first article, it is an entirely different way to produce. But. It lends itself to strict singular production in smaller numbers, which suits delivery vans and busses. Vaccines do not, especially given the requirements of the product and the numbers of doses, on the order of hundreds of millions for this country alone.
As I said above, shitforbrains has zero capacity to comprehend, think about, manage, or even believe he doesn’t know about any of this, given his obvious mental deficits.
J R in WV
@Cheryl Rofer:
My experience is that most project managers need both Oracle DB administrators AND systems analysts AND good coders with up-to-date skills. Not a lot of each of these skills for this kind of project, but a couple of DB analysts, and administrator, and a systems analyst and 4 or 5 good coders. And a month or two.
Which means it could have all been done last summer, tested, and reworked until everything was ironed out, ready for when the vaccine was released to be booked into the inventory for shipment to the ultimate destinations.
Or not, making it easy to steal all you want.
Roger Moore
@wjs:
He knew perfectly well who the governor was. He was stealing a classic line as a way of suggesting Hogan was so ineffective as governor that he might as well not be.
boatboy_srq
I keep saying that Lord Dampnut fully intended to leave his successor a nation of 280 million.
Meaning, there’d be 50 million casualties of his misgovernment.
Seems that isn’t so farfetched, and his maladministration finally figured out how to get it done.
Origuy
RIP Cloris Leachman, 94, of natural causes.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
reading between the lines of public statements– including Fauci and Biden– it seems to me people are really, really confident that the J&J vaccine will be approved. One of the MSNBC doctors said last week that he expects it to come in at 65-70% efficacy, which– as I recall from early discussions of Pfizer and Moderna– is usually considered pretty good, but those two coming in at ~95% may make people wary of getting the J&J
Subsole
@Haroldo: Milo was competent.
WaterGirl
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I sure wouldn’t want Johnson & Johnson at those numbers.
Roger Moore
@bluefoot:
I can back this up. I work at least somewhat in the pharma industry (part of my work is FDA regulated testing of active pharmaceutical ingredients) and the degree of quality control is incredible. The rules are incredibly strict, and for good reason. Trying to scale up something that has never been used for pharma before is an enormous undertaking.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Origuy: Ed Asner (91) writes a nice obit tweet
I hope Comedy Central releases the whole tape of her bit at Bob Saget’s roast. She’ll curl your hair.
Also: FRAU BLUCHER!
VeniceRiley
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think they should reserve Moderna and Pfizer for the over 50 and comorbidities, and give the J&J to the younger. If it still prevents hospitalization level events in that cohort. I wonder how the separate trial of J&J 2 dose will pan out? Apples to apples and all that.
Barbara
@WaterGirl: Take the first vaccine you are offered and then, when supply becomes less of an issue, get another if you are still concerned. Seriously.
Ruckus
@jonas:
Wasn’t there also a problem about just designing/building some parts/vehicles because which measuring system was to be used/was actually used wasn’t on the design drawings. And someone(s) just made a decision without checking.
We manufacture products designed by others and with modern software that is most often used that can be much less of a problem, as long as everyone along the line knows what the system used in the original design was. Because 6 inches is a lot different from 6 mm. So we always now get the original software model so the question is always answered.
mrmoshpotato
@Just Some Fuckhead: You think Dump’s kids somehow developed a sense of shame that they just shoved deep down inside?
From where?
ETA – Dump is a mobster (also a monster autocorrect) and a conman. Neither is really high on the having-shame scale.
And he’s also a Soviet shitpile who did everything he could to hurt this country for Putin.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@VeniceRiley:
I think part of the talk about J&J, more concrete and widespread than what I’m pretty sure I remember one doc saying on TV a tumultuous week ago, is that it’s supposed to be one dose?
Kathleen
@matt the semi-reasonable: I think you covered all the bases quite succinctly.
Ruckus
@mrmoshpotato:
All of them operate in a rarified system of deep, pompous arrogance, which bodes well for their system of deep, pompous stupidity. Not that it bodes well for anyone that has to suffer from that. As has been far too well proven over the last 4 yrs.
Ruckus
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
They started out one dose, they are supposedly starting a trial with a two dose process. That’s what I read this morning. Grain of salt and all that.
Haroldo
@Subsole:
We don’t know the extent to which Jared successfully skimmed and scammed.
But your point is taken.
Ruckus
@matt the semi-reasonable:
The VA only gives appointments to six arms at a time. They will allow walk ups but will not open a vial until 6 arms are available. At least at the hospital I use the vaccine is Pfizer.
I’ll let every one know how it goes Friday afternoon.
debbie
@satby:
Seconded. Bastards.
boatboy_srq
@Cheryl Rofer: Federal sector has done a remarkable job either scaring away talent or underbidding for the talent interested in working there. Between not-refreshed-since-the-1970s workspaces, ridiculous pay, zero-COLA contracting, and a host of other practices, and never mind the work atmosphere tRumpets push from Cabinet-level, it’s getting difficult to find the people qualified and capable there.
A personal anecdote: Just last year I was offered a position at a federal-level institution who shall remain nameless, doing less than my job at the time, with zero growth potential, for a mere $20K pay cut and at the time a doubly-lengthy commute. Needless to say I did not take it. They still don’t understand why I turned them down. I know more than one person who has eschewed federal employment for similar reasons. And these are just a handful of instances.
mrmoshpotato
@Ruckus: Arrogance and stupidity does not a sense of shame make. They can also be shameless scumbags.
(Apologies to scum and bags.)
Dan B
It’s good to read that the vaccination process is going well for people in WA state. Three friends have had their first jabs and my partner gets his Saturday. I was unable to get onto Kaiser’s website. My password is not recognized nor are the answers to my security questions. I gave up and called. 6 hours later I had an appointment for March 6th, six weeks away as the first cases of B.1.1.7 are detected in the next county. I’m the most vulnerable of any of my friends to dying from this. And we are in the first phase of shortages so the alternate provider I tried has not gotten back to me. They had my good friend vaccinated two days after she signed up.
It’s obvious that Inslee and the health department had spent months setting up protocols and organization to administer shots but now, with shortages, he will be blamed by the voters because or MSM will refuse to point out the source of the problem.
Kathleen
@WaterGirl: Don’t know if this helps but here’s an excerpt of Jennifer Rubin’s analysis (I screwed up the blocky part):
debbie
@rikyrah:
I remember a whistleblower saying just that. Jared and Trump operated on the assumption that slow-walking assistance of any kind to the blue states would help Trump’s chances (he already knew he was likely to lose) in November.
debbie
@matt the semi-reasonable:
Remember “You have to be nice to me…”?
The Moar You Know
@boatboy_srq: I’m a Fed contractor and that’s bad enough. I’d never take a job with the actual Feds for all the reasons you just outlined. I go into Fed offices and I don’t understand how they can deal with it without a lot of medication. Depressing isn’t the word, it’s fucking appalling.
And quite a few of those workplaces reek of week-old food. Don’t ask me why that’s my dealbreaker but it is.
Kineslaw
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Is 65% efficacy even enough with the UK variant? It does explain why J&J is starting a two-dose trial.
The more info that comes out about the other vaccines, the more pressure it seems to put on Pfizer and Moderna to ramp up production.
It also seems like we need to get some studies started with people that get the J&J vaccine and a mRNA booster.
WaterGirl
@Kathleen: Thank you!
and I fixed your block quote issue.
bluefoot
@Roger Moore: My mind boggles when I think about what must have gone into analytical validation for these mRNA vaccines. Lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA that’s stable and functional? Ensuring content uniformity once you add saline for injection (for the PFizer/BioNTech vaccine)? I mean, not just content uniformity once it leaves the factory, but once a vial is thawed, saline added and mixed? I swear, it’s magic.
debbie
@Cheryl Rofer:
I checked my state. That’s a hell of a lot of information in just the first week!
Elie
@bluefoot:
Thanks for the information — as you say – Incredible//!
dm
@boatboy_srq:
Merck and Pfizer/Moderna are very different processes. I saw one comparison: “That’s like asking Nike to make IPhones”.
Elie
@The Moar You Know:
I worked for CMS/ (then HCFA) twenty years ago. The Feds were not the shit show you describe. We had cutting edge personnel who were expert in health finance and quality. The Federal government was DESTROYED on purpose. I was proud of the people that I worked with and their intelligence. Go easy on shitting on it — even now. It doesn’t help. We have to ramp up the work force of the many destroyed and damaged agencies again. Talking up how shitty it is doesn’t help.
Ruckus
@mrmoshpotato:
Arrogance and stupidity normally precludes shame.
And these shitheads have an over abundance of arrogance and stupidity. A huge over abundance.
bluefoot
@Elie: I admit that if you told me two months ago that you could do this – create an mRNA vaccine like these that worked, I would have been, “Go home, you’re drunk.” Hell, part of me still feels this way. I have enough knowledge and experience to truly think this is miraculous. We are so damned lucky that this virus came along at a time where this kind of technology is even *possible*.
mali muso
Just back from working my first shift as a volunteer at the local mass vaccination clinic! I just did clerical work (checking people in), but it felt AMAZING to be part of a well-oiled machine swiftly processing and vaccinating thousands.
Ruckus
@bluefoot:
I wonder if a lot of people have been working in this direction for some time? The concept of the drug, from concept to fruition had to be longer than 6-8 months
If the concept had been proven then all that would be required would be how to produce the mRNA and adjust the delivery system.
boatboy_srq
@The Moar You Know: For me the dealbreaker was the cigarette stains still coating ceiling tiles decades after indoor smoking was banned. There’s a sense they can’t be bothered. I know a lot of it stems from the need to fulfill the mission in the face of constant budget wrangling and arguments with pols who resent every penny of their department’s budget, but there’s still the sense that everyone involved is making the place toxic.
S. Cerevisiae
I got the first shot of the Moderna vaccine today, my arm muscle is a little bit sore but not bad at all. My big in area small in population northwoods county is doing well with vaccinations, I think over 12% now when statewide it’s about 6.
if I grow any new appendages I’ll let you know…
JaneE
It looks like Trump & co wanted to avoid responsibility by saying it was the states’ problem and then micromanage the distribution. Or they just wanted to deliberately garbage up the data so the Biden administration couldn’t figure out which end was up, or both.
Part of me says that data doesn’t get that messed up without some real effort. At least it didn’t 20 years ago when I was working. Gross incompetence can do it, but someone who wants the project to succeed will call a halt and demand a redo fairly quickly, if the actual results are something they want. Some projects were, in fact, designed to stroke the egos of executive row, and some of those were garbage because so no one who did any real work used them at all.
bluefoot
@Ruckus: it’s been about a decade of work for RNA-based vaccines but it’s nearly all been on the research level, with some early-stage clinical work. This doesn’t count all the prior work how how to get RNA into a heterologous system. Way back in the late 90’s/early 2000’s I did my share using old-school systems (like direct injection into individual cells or electroporation). That you can inject mRNA intramuscularly and express Spike protein and mount an appropriate immune response is so freaking cool.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: She was also hilarious in Raising Hope. I always thought she deserved the full Betty White treatment sometime in the last decade.
Feathers
@Ruckus: Having worked for a lab, the gap between “hand built by several PhD researchers and grad students, who need a couple of tries to get it to work right” and “mass production, available to buy on Amazon” is hard to understand for most people. I was coming from the publishing/filmmaking world. I thought success in science/tech was more straightforward and that the best products/projects made it through. Two years convinced me otherwise.
Ruckus
@bluefoot:
Yes it is.
It is also why I said that I think people have been working in this direction for a while. As far as I understand this is the first time this direction has been used in the real world, but the concept has been, as you stated, being worked on for some time. I’d bet the delivery system for any particular mRNA would have to be build but the fact that two providers have done it in different directions in about the same time tells me the groundwork/basic research was there, with delivery details rather well established and only needing finalization/blind testing.
Suzanne
SuzMom is scheduled to get her first shot tomorrow. I have to drive her to an adjacent county, but it apparently is only about 45 minutes to get there. Fingers crossed.
ETA: I am hoping that they will offer it to me, too, Some places are also doing family and escorts.
Feathers
Cloris Leachman’s first onscreen role was astonishing and memorable. Here she is in the opening shots of Kiss Me Deadly (1955!). RIP to a film noir queen.
Ruckus
@Feathers:
New directions take time, no matter the process.
I started programing numerical control machines in 1973 and the difference in going from idea to solid product of dramatically more complexity than what was possible then is dramatic. The machines have become far, far more accurate, far, far faster, the computers/software didn’t even exist back then, I started with a slide rule and a teletype machine making paper tape. We could only do small sections of 3D surfaces, where as today’s machines can do entire projects of intersecting surfaces. And far faster. We can put it on a computer and look at it from any direction and from many types of models. That ability didn’t exist back then, anywhere. Now it’s available/affordable to a small business like ours was 47 yrs ago. And even 30 yrs ago the computers, while expensive, could do far more than even 10 year prior.
Platonicspoof
My reading of this article (3 free articles) and others and the comments here, is that distribution at the state level, and then the feedback to the feds, is broken because the states have a myriad of tracking systems.
Because of trump we lost a year of organizing down to the patients’ arms.
Aleta
If health care were a right, and not for profit, do you think the the distribution system might already be organized and better centralized? There’s so much money being made from tests and vaccines that I wonder if the profit pieces of the different systems are slowing things down.
Brachiator
@Aleta:
No. Absence of a profit motive does not automatically make a system efficient or insure effective manufacture and distribution.
Good question. But every country producing vaccines seem to be having some problems.
Robert Sneddon
@bluefoot: When the dust has settled on this particular epidemic I expect some of the mRNA researchers and developers to get Nobel Prizes.
Looking past the current problem, large though it is, the (claimed) effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines compared to the other more conventional modified/killed virus-based vaccines indicate there’s a big future for this technology. I caught sight of a paper, it’s still in-vitro testing but the paper authors were suggesting an mRNA vaccine might be developed to treat/prevent multiple sclerosis. The Big C might be next…
Ruckus
@Robert Sneddon:
This is my basis for why the vaccines were developed so fast. They were able to use the concept of mRNA vaccines because of this virus, and possibly many more and I think it is all the lead up work that brought that time down to months. If you are correct and I think you might be, this might change human life as we know it.
Felanius Kootea
If you really want to get mad about vaccine distribution, read this Washington Post article: Philadelphia let ‘college kids’ distribute vaccines. The result was a ‘disaster,’ volunteers say.
Basically, Philly Fighting COVID, a group of college kids with no medical backgrounds (who had, in fairness, done a decent job helping with COVID-19 testing) got a contract to help distribute the vaccine. They botched it. Turns out it helps to have people with some medical training when dealing with vaccine distribution. Nursing or PA students would have been good. Plus they decided to go from being a non-profit to a for-profit organization and then added a clause permitting them to sell the personal info of anyone who signed up to get the vaccine. Hello HIPAA violations.
Heartbreaking when they had to turn away the elderly who signed up because
their sign up website had a glitch and overbooked appointments.
Most annoying part:
The journalist doesn’t say who awarded Philly Fighting COVID the vaccine distribution contract.
laura
Man I hope that the Biden / Harris administration can get every grocery worker, deliver worker, heath care, travel and transit, education and childcare, congregate community care residents in the coming months. I had zero hope or expectation it would occur in the prior maladministration. Then maybe spouse and I may have a chance. In the meantime, I can be found in the couch cushion fort, defensively crouched and still anxious about this miserable and potentially lethal virus.
lowtechcyclist
Who knew that an Administration that not only separated thousands of kids from their parents, but couldn’t keep track of which kid belonged to which parent, would lose track of millions of doses of vaccine?
And even that’s giving the benefit of the doubt on them simply pilfering it all.
We need to have a full investigation of pretty much everything the Trump Administration has ever done, wall to wall. And then throw the lot of them in prison for life. Gitmo can be repurposed to hold both the grifters and the insurrectionists.
SFAW
@rikyrah:
My wife, who has become more cynical lately, said that they were probably routed to Trump pals, who would then make a killing off of them. [Literally and figuratively, I guess.] So I guess we’ll be watching to see if “Jarvanka’s Vaccines, Fashion Stuff, and Real Estate, Inc.” has a sale on vaccine doses in the near future
ETA: And I see plenty of others are thinking the same/similar thing.
WaterGirl
@laura: There’s a chance that could happen with all the people who are turning down the vaccine.
Kathleen
@WaterGirl: Thank you WG! Only in my case it was a user caused block issue!
wjs
@Roger Moore: Well, that went over my head.
Here I was, just assuming Friedman was ridiculous and out of touch.
Dopey-o
Gee, i think that underpaid Oracle administrator could have saved a lot of lost kids on the southern border.