Something to keep in mind:
💉Half the eligible population has had a first dose.
🕐Vaccine lines and waits are disappearing.
📦Supply is soaring.📉The end of the “mass” part of the U.S. vaccine campaign is coming to an end. The rest will be much different.
👓I’ve been watching the U.S. vaccine rollout every day for the last four months. It started slow, gained momentum, took off like a rocket and has likely now peaked.
⚠️Success going forward is going to look very different. The metrics from March are not the metrics for May.
In March, we saw many states with 90%+ of delivered supply used. That was very efficient vaccine usage, but also tight supply.
Those % figures are now falling, as they probably should. Tight supply is not what you want when you’re targeting harder-to-reach/convince populations.
The Biden admin says they’re pursuing a policy of “overwhelm the problem”. That means:
💉Lots of vaccine sitting around, ready
🏪At lots of locations
📆Many open appointmentsIf you saw that in March, you’d say “this is a failure.” This is a different point in the rollout.
The Biden team was very happy, as were lots of people, about big dose numbers a month ago. Here’s how they’re talking about it now, which more or less matches w/ my read:
“Going forward, we expect daily vaccination rates will moderate and fluctuate.”
“We’ve gotten vaccinations to the most at-risk and those most eager to get vaccinated as quickly as possible.”
“It’s OK if there’s not a long line of 1,000 people… That’s good, that was the plan.”
I think that’s correct. It doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of work to do! It just means that work, and the numbers, look different.
“Mass” vaccination is useful when you have a huge mass of people who all need and want to be vaccinated at once.
What’s next is more boutique.
📽️Think of it like a blockbuster movie release (remember those?)
🧑🤝🧑Mass vaccination is everyone who rushed to see it in theaters on week one.
📺We’re about to start the “I’ll catch it on Netflix in a couple weeks” crowd.
There is some very good news here. There are a LOT of people who have gotten their first shots. Almost all of them seem likely to complete their second. (I know there’s a sort of doomsy piece in the Times today, but… it’s still 92% completion)
Right now, the U.S. is about where Israel was in mid-Feb. (This uses our apples to apples “enough for X% metric, which helps create good comparisons).
They kept vaccinating after that point to about 50% of their pop. (and are now at ~60%).
Look at the case curve.
(The usual caveats: The U.S. isn’t Israel, etc etc etc)
I hope this helps people as they think about how to read the numbers going forward. In short:
📦Supply % is gonna go up
📉Vaccine numbers are going to go down
🧑🏭The next phase means reaching people at a grind, not a rush
🕯️That’s probably fineHere’s our full vaccine tracker, which I hope you’ll give a look at bookmark:
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/?sref=leQ3i2ya
And here’s my story, which has a few things not in this thread:
Originally tweeted by Drew Armstrong (@ArmstrongDrew) on April 25, 2021.