Can We Fix the Chaotic Vaccine Rollout?

dropping anytime soon. The US is leading all countries and deaths, with Brazil, India, Mexico and the UK next in line. Meanwhile, New York City will run out of vaccines next week. The city's mayor, build A. Blasio said in an interview today that there will be no more doses available after this week unless there is the supply infusion. Hospitals across the city have canceled or stopped scheduling appointments for people to get the COVID nineteen vaccine. In Italy, an advisor

says the country needs to reimpose strict lockdown measures. Walter Richiardi, an advisor to the health minister, said in an interview that the current system of on again, off again curbs has failed to prevent a coronavirus resurgence. The original European epicenter of the pandemic, Italy, imposed a nationwide lockdown in the spring, despite more than two million virus cases to

date and a resurgence in recent weeks. The government has thus far opted for a three tier system based on regional restrictions that are generally softer the the measures scene last spring. Finally, Fiser has notified countries around the world that it will deliver fewer doses of its COVID nineteen vaccine in the next three to four weeks as it works to renovate a factory in Belgium. The renovations will serve to boost capacity from mid February. According to statements

from Norway, Germany and the company. The factory in Pures supplies the vaccine to all countries in the world outside of the US. That's according to the German Health Ministry. And now for today's main story. An accelerating rush to give coronavirus vaccines to Americans has caused confusion over who can get a shot when, and the difficulty getting shots or even information about the vaccine is complicating to push

towards widespread immunity. I spoke to health reporter Michelle fake Cortez about what's going wrong with the vaccine rollout thus far and whether the upcoming Biden administration's plans for it will improve anything. COVID nineteen vaccines have been available in the US for almost over a month now, but there still seems to be a great deal of confusion about who is eligible to get a vaccine and where one

can get a vaccine. I mean, just briefly, what has led to things being so unclear at this point In the United States, Every location has their own vaccine approach, and when I say location, I don't even mean state or city. In some cases it's by county or even by hospital. So where you go and when you go in order to get access to a vaccine changes depending on where you live. Not only that, the rules them

elves are changing. So in some cases, in some places, if you're sixty five and older, universally you can get access to the vaccinations, regardless of whether you're a health care worker, first responder, if you have other medical conditions or anything. In some other cases, it's still very specific. Only people who work in a hospital or live in a nursing home can get access. So that's the first

level of complexity. The second level of complexity is that even for those who do have access, actually accessing that access is challenging. There are websites set up. Sometimes it's the state or the city that has set up the websites, sometimes it's a hospital. Those get overwhelmed. Many of them are crashing repeatedly, and there's just no consistent outlet for information on who, when, where to get vaccinations. And it is an unbelievable conglomeration of formation and really no one

has mastered it yet. Is it also an issue of enough people trained to store or administer the vaccines in this particular moment as we're speaking right now, there is not an issue with supply, not when it comes to the vaccines and not when it comes to the people who are willing to administer them. That being said, as we start rolling out more and more, supply is going

to be a critical issue. There's no way that we'll be able to get that many shots into people's arms in order to accommodate everyone who wants to get one.

That being said, we are seeing astonishing stories across the country of healthcare workers who are volunteering, people who are working in emergency rooms during the day and volunteering at night to give injections, people who normally work in nursing homes in other places going and doing the check ins and volunteering their time and effort, because this really is a nationwide effort, and especially those people on the front lines really do know how urgent it is that we

get these vaccinations out there. Just last night, President elect Joe Biden announced a one point nine trillion dollar plan to combat the pandemic, including a strategy for rebooting the vaccine rollout. I was wondering if you might go into some detail about what exactly he's proposing and whether you think it's going to be enough to turn this around. President elect Biden has been very clear from the beginning that he wants to have a more national approach when

it comes to fighting coronavirus. That's certainly the case when it comes to this vaccination rollout, which of course is going to be the foundation for getting rid of the virus not only in the US but in the world. So he unrolled a twenty billion dollar plan to make sure that we have a universal vaccination program in place. This is going to be critically important because it's going to take the process away from that free for all that we're seeing among the states and locations and really

kind of hone it in. Most critically, it's going to give the states and locations the money that it needs to get this work done, and in many cases, what we've seen is the lack of money and manpower that has made it such a challenge. Now the details of the program are still to come, but we do know that it's going to be a twenty billion dollar effort.

It's going to involve things like helping locations rent out big spaces like sports stadiums and amphitheaters, including doing things like setting up twenty four hour vaccination clinics and even even putting some of them on wheels, getting out some mobile units that will be able to bring the vaccines to the more rural and remote parts of our country so that everybody will have access to the vaccine, not

just based on where they live. As far as the ability to hit President elect Biden's goal, which is a hundred million vaccinations in the first hundred days of his presidency, that's going to be a little bit of a challenge. We've already seen that we're getting closer to the rate of one million vaccinations a day as the healthcare system has been rolling out this process. So we are getting better, but there is going to be a heavy lift to

get us to the next level. Now. One of the elements that has popped up in the news quite a bit is the difficulty in storing these vaccines that level of fragility in terms of making sure that the vaccine is still viable. How perhaps is that contributing to some of the confusion about how quickly vaccines can be distributed

and administered. One of the challenges is definitely the fact that these first vaccines that we have are m RNA vaccines, the kind that have to be kept in subarctic temperatures. The key problem here is that once you thaw them, they have to be used right away. You can't save

them up for later. There are stories of people who are offered the vaccine because they're in a grocery store, or they're walking down a street close to a vaccination clinic that has extra shots left over, and they're going to have to throw them away, so they're out there scrambling to give them to anyone that might be willing to take them. For lack of better explanation, that's becoming less and less common as the number of people who

can qualify have been increased in these locations. Understand that they need to have a bigger number of people waiting so that we have people waiting for the vaccine, not the vaccine waiting for the people, So we're seeing less and less of that. Another concern is that the vaccines are difficult to break down into smaller lots, so they get sent out in large numbers and you have to vaccinate a large number of people at one time, so

it's harder to get to rural and small areas. I mean, there does seem to be a push and pull debate going on right now almost globally about whether to immunize as many people as quickly as possible or making sure the eligible people, the people in line for first, get their doses first. Absolutely, it's exactly what we're talking about here. The issue is quantity versus quality, and it's the issue of what's good for the global health versus what's good

for the individual health. So we know that in order to get protection against the virus, we're going to need to get to hurt immunity. That means at least the population is either going to need to have been vaccinated or to have been infected with the virus. The best way to get to those kind of numbers is to just open the spigots and vaccinate as many people as you can. Let's get the line set up and just go seven as much as you can. Use every bit of the vaccine the minute it comes off of the

the production line, get it into someone's arms. That's the most efficient way to get to those high numbers. The challenge there is that there's some portions of the population

that are significantly lower risk. So if you're going to be vaccinating people like you and need potentially who are younger, perhaps more healthy, don't have as many comorbidities, not living in a nursing home, not seeing patients with coronavirus every day, the fact that we're protected against it is going to have less global impact on the virus itself, and it's going to have less benefit in terms of reducing deaths, for example, because we would be already at low risk

for contracting the virus and dying from it. So the issue is whether you really want to make sure that the right people get vaccinated, which is a more difficult ask. You have to have more hurdles, you have to have more slatting, You have to be evaluating each person as opposed to just opening up the floodgates. On the other hand, if you open the floodgates, fewer of those people who are high risk are going to be able to get vaccinated.

They're going to be competing against millions and millions of other people who need it. So it's a question of what do you want to do. Do you want to protect all the healthcare workers, do you want to protect for the people who are most likely to die. Do you want to protect first the people who are most likely to be spreading the virus, or do you just want to get to hurt immunity as quickly as you can.

The paths to both of those things are different, and every state, every location is trying to split the difference here and figure out how they want to best protect their populations, you know, trying to adhere to perhaps the quality side versus the quantity side, making sure the people most at risk are getting those doses first is a very tall logistical order, and and there have been accusations

that really America's infrastructure just can't cope with this. I mean, what what is your response to that, you know, is the system as it exists able to handle this incredibly complex logistical challenge. It's a great question, and it's only going to get worse as the numbers get bigger. I think the challenge that we've seen early on in this endeavor to start vaccinations is the fact that it's the

beginning of this massive undertaking. It's just hard to get these shots out to people, going through the cold changed storage, thawing everything, handling everything in exactly the right way, knowing which people you want to send to which nursing home, and administering all the shots. It's just tricky. And the more that they do that, the more that our healthcare professionals are on the front lines and getting this done,

the more smoothly this process is going to happen. The challenge is that we're going to have millions and millions more people who are lining up and wanting this in the days and weeks to come. We did see challenges early on. I don't think that should have been surprising for anyone, But really, we were only trying to vaccinate

twenty million or fewer people in these first few weeks. Now, with both the Trump administration and the Biden administration saying that we should be trying to vaccinate everybody sixty five and older, that's a hundred and twenty eight million people. So the challenge is just going to be exponentially greater. That was Michelle Fake Cortez. And that's it for our

show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one hundred and twenty bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Topher foreheads Magnus Henrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Michelle Fake Quartets. Original music by Leo Sidrin.

Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesca Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. Thanks for listening.