Following up on the posts below, get a load of this from Vanity Fair:
In late December and early January, as COVID-19 vaccines were just beginning their chaotic rollout to the states, a secretive scramble took place inside the Trump White House. One after another, political appointees at very high levels approached chief of staff Mark Meadows and members of the National Security Council to ask a favor: They wanted to be on the list.
It was, to be sure, the ultimate VIP list: On it were the names of U.S. government officials whose work was considered so essential that they needed to be vaccinated against COVID-19 from a limited allotment that would otherwise have gone to the general public. The allotment was intended to protect career staff who could not telecommute (such as White House butlers), critical workers in the field (such as Secret Service agents), and those in the line of presidential succession (such as the secretary of state). The question of who was eligible in an outgoing administration, with just weeks remaining until the inauguration of a new president, was complex. To make the cut your role had to be “essential” to national functions.
The quest to get on the White House list—which was closely guarded by Meadows’s office and a small cadre of NSC officials—attracted an array of supplicants. They ranged from the representatives of cabinet secretaries to young White House desk jockeys to those prepared to leverage their connections to President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
This happened all over the administration by people who were publicly refusing to wear masks and were “downplaying” the virus.
Why, in a White House infamous for flouting pandemic precautions, would some political appointees in the executive branch show such determination in attempting to score a shot? According to the former senior administration official, the answer is simple enough: Vaccinations would enable these high-flying rule flouters to “maintain” their active lifestyles.
The previously unreported struggle over the White House list was just one front in a sprawling secret war that raged for months at the highest levels of the federal government. The question of how to equitably vaccinate a federal workforce of 2.1 million people in the midst of a presidential transition ended up pitting the National Security Council against officials from Operation Warp Speed, and career staff against political appointees. It also sparked resentment, suspicions of missing doses, and allegations of line jumping.
And it all played out against the backdrop of a critical shortage of vaccine doses across the nation. In the waning days of the Trump administration, with nearly 2,500 Americans dying of COVID-19 every day, what had been envisioned as a triumphant vaccine rollout soon devolved into Hunger Games–style chaos. As vulnerable residents struggled to score shots in fragmented state sign-up systems, governors furiously blamed federal officials at Operation Warp Speed for continually revising the number of doses they would receive.
Underlying all this was an unforgiving zero-sum math equation: In December and January, the program had roughly 70 million doses to fully vaccinate 35 million Americans with first and second shots, to be divided on a per capita basis among 64 jurisdictions, including 50 states, eight territories, and six metropolitan areas.
By definition, any dose given to anyone—whether in the states or in the State Department—would be taken from someone else, given the lack of any surplus.
No one disputed that the federal government ought to reserve a portion of vaccinations in order to protect its own essential workforce. But from there the questions got much thornier. Did employees within a White House that flouted safeguards, and was holding mask-less holiday parties, deserve a shot? What about Department of the Interior firefighters, dousing flames on federal lands? Or Border Patrol agents in pursuit of undocumented immigrants?
No WH employee who was flouting masks andattending holiday parties deserved to get a shot. I wouldn’t say that about anyone else (well, maybe Fox News hosts) but these people were destructive on a whole other level.
They started out with a legit plan to vaccinate the most essential workers. But then it became the usual Trump cock-up:
The story of how it became one reflects the larger M.O. of the Trump administration, said a federal official who worked on the pandemic response. “You had a functioning government that did its due diligence,” only to be thwarted by arbitrary and secretive decisions. “That’s what happened with every single thing in the White House.”
[Their] relatively democratic process soon collided with the secretive decision-making culture inside Operation Warp Speed. The multibillion-dollar government program, launched last spring, was a collaboration among the Pentagon, the Department of Health and Human Services, and a number of pharmaceutical companies to dramatically accelerate the development and production of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics. The four-star general Gustave F. Perna was in charge of logistics, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar oversaw his efforts. Even to some Operation Warp Speed board members, it seemed that the two men operated with little input from others. And when the CDC sent Perna a proposal to meet regularly to review decisions about the distribution of vaccinations, it was met with “crickets,” according to a CDC official. (A Pentagon spokesperson said, “There’s nothing I’m aware of that he didn’t respond to.”)
In October a new set of allocations materialized. Allotments of COVID-19 vaccines were approved for five agencies: the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Bureau of Prisons, the Indian Health Service, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which shared its doses with the Department of Homeland Security.
[…]
The operation was so opaque that even members of the Operation Warp Speed board and the White House COVID-19 task force say they were left in the dark. When several caught wind of the seemingly random vaccinations of healthy, young federal employees, they suspected that vaccine doses were being siphoned, without clear accounting, from the nation’s overall supply, Vanity Fair has learned
[…]
Nevertheless, resentment brewed as young, healthy, teleworking employees in some agencies scored vaccinations while others facing extreme perils could not. One example underscores the absurdity of the arrangement: A team of infectious disease experts from the CDC who were deploying to Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo to fight an Ebola outbreak were vaccinated against Ebola but not COVID, despite the evident hazards they faced, Vanity Fair has learned. Those employees have since been vaccinated, said a CDC spokesperson.
“The entire fiasco of the distribution falls to Perna,” said one HHS official. “We knew that [the Department of Defense] was extremely well taken care of, the intelligence community was. And then there was everybody else.”
It was a gigantic mess and they continually made it worse. Everyone was working at cross purposes and the people with juice in the WH were getting “taken care of.” Of course. Even when Trump tweeted that the vaccines would only be available to career staff (who had reason to be terrified of all the Republicans officials who refused to wear masks or take any precautions) the insiders found a way:
Still, the “specifically necessary” wording in Trump’s tweet gave those angling for vaccinations room to continue maneuvering, as the back channel clamor for them grew. It also left room for some justifiable additions. Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, who had suffered a heart attack in 2018—and who publicly played down the pandemic’s severity—got a vaccination to protect his health. Kudlow, who is 73, told Vanity Fair that he was “super grateful” to be vaccinated, adding that he regarded it “as a miracle that I didn’t get COVID” from working at the White House. “There were one or two of us who escaped it,” he added.
Yeah. A miracle.
This, of course, was the kicker. After Trump ostentatiously told the public that he didn’t need the vaccine and that he was making it available only for the front line staff we now know this:
As it turned out, Donald and Melania Trump were vaccinated at the White House in January, out of the public eye. After saying the doses should be reserved for career staff, he evidently made an exception for himself.
He and Melania both had had COVID already and theoretically should have had some immunity. And I doubt that anyone would have balked if he got it. He’s old, he was still the president. He could have done what all the other high profile officials did — get the shot in public and tell others to do so as soon as it became available.
He didn’t because he didn’t want to admit that he needed it or appear to be crossing his base.
It is an interesting bind he got himself into. He’s desperate to take credit for the vaccines but he’s the one who convinced his own voters that the virus is a hoax. And he’s terrified of losing them.