america-needs-better-vaccine-plan--story

President Biden's team has reviewed their predecessors' agenda for COVID-19 vaccine distribution and reportedly discovered the plans had the significant problem of failing to exist. "There is nothing for us to rework," an unnamed source with knowledge of the new administration's COVID-19 efforts told CNN. "We are going to have to build everything from scratch."

In that it means months of potential progress have been needlessly lost — that the abysmally slow vaccination pace we've seen since mid-December was not inevitable — this is a horrifying revelation. But there may be an advantage here: The Biden administration can craft its vaccine distribution plan and, crucially, its messaging with a free hand.

The message the Biden administration should be preaching is this: The vaccines are good. In fact, they are remarkably good. They are best-case scenario good. Our goal now is to get these good vaccines into as many people as possible as rapidly as possible so we can return to normal as soon as possible, because that is what the vaccines will enable us to do. Do you hate masks? Are you tired of social distancing? Do you want this whole stupid, awful thing to be over? That is what the vaccines can do — if we get them into our bodies, for, as epidemiologist Walter Orenstein observes, "vaccines which remain in the vial are 0 percent effective." It is vaccinations, not vaccines, that save lives.