Twelve minutes before noon on Wednesday, President Joe Biden was sworn into office as the nation’s 46th president. Seven hours later, the United States reported more than 4,409 new deaths from the novel coronavirus, according to data collected by the COVID-19 Tracking Project.
The Biden administration came into power with purpose and an extensive agenda to combat the coronavirus pandemic, but purpose and planning only gets you so far—particularly when the president’s team is only just now getting a clear picture of how badly the previous administration had managed the crisis.
“What we’re inheriting from the Trump administration is so much worse than we could have imagined,” Jeff Zients, the Biden administration’s COVID-19 czar, said in a call with reporters Wednesday. “We don’t have the visibility that we would hope to have into supply and allocations.”
“I think we have to level-set expectations,” added Tom Frieden, the former director for the Centers for Disease Control in the Obama administration. “There are lots of things that an incoming administration can do on Day One, including speaking honestly about the pandemic.”
The new administration is already behind, in part because the Trump administration was unprecedentedly hostile during the transition. The question now, however, is how Biden can get a handle on a raging pandemic when his team is already so far behind.
The task at hand is enormous. More than 400,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. Every state, territory and the District of Columbia is in a state of emergency. The number of people infected with the virus who are now hospitalized is more than double the number reached during the spring and summer peaks.At least we won’t have a president that’s actively fighting those rules on national television.— official working with Biden COVID team
It’s not just the spread of the virus that the Biden team needs to tackle. Officials will also have to confront the disinformation and misinformation about the virus that has permeated all four corners of the country—where people still believe the virus is a hoax and that public health guidelines are too great of an imposition on their personal freedom to follow. But it’s unclear what power of persuasion the Biden administration will hold and if it will be enough to convince people to take the virus more seriously.
“At least we won’t have a president that’s actively fighting those rules on national television,” one official working with the new Biden COVID-19 team said.
More urgently, Biden and his team will have to handle the growing frustration among states over the lack of a comprehensive vaccine-distribution program that enables them to inoculate their residents quickly. They will have to find a way to get states more vaccines needed to meet Americans’ growing demand for the shot.
Biden’s COVID-19 team says the president will use the Defense Production Act (DPA) to ensure that health-care facilities have what they need for personal protective equipment and to continue to scale testing across the country. Officials say Biden will also use the act and “other legal authorities” for “raw materials to ensure that bottlenecks do not slow down [vaccine] production,” Zients said, specifically mentioned the production of syringes as critical to success.
It’s still unclear exactly when the president will invoke the DPA, and if the administration will lean on the legal authority for the production of supplies other than vaccine syringes.
“Making vaccines is not simple, and you can’t cut any corners,” Frieden said. “We’ll see if there’s anything more that can be done.”
Biden enters office as states across the country are grappling with massive vaccine shortages. Hospitals and pharmacies have begun to run out, forcing them to cancel first and second dose appointments. Officials in states such as California, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, New York, New Jersey, and Arizona this week called on the federal government to not only help facilitate the shipment of additional vaccines but to clearly communicate how many doses they should expect to receive in the coming days. They’ve received no answers, according to six state health officials, all of whom requested to remain anonymous to speak more freely about the issue.
Here’s an example of how screwed up this is:
As Los Angeles County makes coronavirus vaccinations available to residents 65-year-old and over, public health officials say doses are in “extremely limited supply.”
“To county residents who are 65 and older please understand that how soon you can get a vaccination depends on the number of doses we receive every week,” L.A. County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer said Wednesday.
Ferrer says with nearly 1.4 million seniors 65 and older and up to 800,000 eligible health care workers, the number of vaccines needed to complete two shots is more than 4 million. But so far, just over 850,000 doses have been delivered.“Often we do not know from one week to the next how many doses will be allocated to L.A. County,” Ferrer said.
It’s a mess. And it’s going to take some time to get it straightened out. Everyone still needs to hunker down for a while.