Name: “When We Say Things Were Worse Than We Thought, That’s What We Mean”: Inside Biden’s Plan to Push Through COVID Vaccine Chaos
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“When We Say Things Were Worse Than We Thought, That’s What We Mean”: Inside Biden’s Plan to Push Through COVID Vaccine Chaos

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Maybe my question was confusing. Or maybe California’s COVID response is such a mess, and the troubles the state is confronting are so numerous, that the senior Biden administration official didn’t know where to start his answer. “I’m not sure whether you’re asking about the vaccination program progress or about the public health issues about the new variant, so I don’t want to answer something that’s not being asked,” he replied tentatively. “I saw what you saw, which was the comments from the California health department that they were revamping the program to get more vaccinations out more successfully. And we are in contact with them to make sure we can help them do that. We have a system where every state is at a little bit of a different stage.”That’s putting it politely. Whether it’s being tossed in the trash in New York or senior citizens sitting in lawn chairs in Florida or shifting in Oklahoma, vaccine rollout has been rocky from coast to coast. To be clear: Donald Trump and his aides deserve the blame for the awful state of U.S. pandemic relief efforts as of January 20, and the lingering logistical hangover from the Trump administration’s incompetence will continue for months. Yet Joe Biden’s team is feeling the pressure to straighten out the crisis it inherited, and to do so fast—primarily because of the public health and economic emergencies, but also because it knows that it is working with little, if any, political honeymoon period. Fair or not, the Biden administration now owns the problems.Its plan of attack has three main elements. The first, increasing the supply of vaccine, was addressed this week with a in the number of doses being distributed to states for the next three weeks, and with the of 200 million more doses from Pfizer and Moderna, to be delivered by the end of the summer. The unveiling of those increases was a prime illustration of the second part of Biden’s strategy: aggressively communicating the administration’s moves to combat COVID. The additional doses were even if Trump had remained president, but Biden’s team, in background briefings and press conferences, did a savvy job of selling the announcement as wholly fresh progress. A high-ranking administration operative, however, says that focusing on credit for dosage production misses the more important point. “The Trump plan was to get a vaccine and then figure out the rest. There was absolutely zero infrastructure or planning on how to get the vaccine to the next level of people, beyond hospitals and nursing homes,” the operative says. “When we say things were worse than we thought, that’s what we mean. There was no plan for broad distribution, so that’s what we’re focused on.&nbsp;It’s all about shots in arms, not about how many doses.”Which leads to the third, crucially interrelated piece of the Biden strategy: getting Congress to appropriate more than a trillion dollars toward COVID relief, including mechanisms such as mass-vaccination sites and mobile injection units. That’s why, in the past few days, Biden officials have been singing a coordinated tune, publicly and privately. “It will help significantly if Congress acts to pass the bill in front of them that will put money into the states to help them increase vaccination efforts,” the senior administration official told me. “It will be important that that be addressed for all of these plans to work. It’s more like an orchestra than a solo. Everybody has to do their part, including the Congress.”&nbsp;On Thursday two top Biden pandemic officials, Brian Deese and Jeff Zients, the Senate Democratic caucus about why the money is needed and how it will be allocated. Other senior White House advisers, including Ron Klain and Anita Dunn, have been jawboning legislators from both parties. It’s all part of what one aide says will be a “campaign-style” approach to getting the COVID relief bill through Congress, and it’s the kind of full-court press that had been standard practice when a president prioritized a piece of legislation—until Trump, who showed no interest in that kind of political blocking and tackling. “Donald Trump wasn’t out there every day pushing for the need for COVID relief. Really, he was the opposite,” a Democratic Senate insider says. “Joe Biden in the bully pulpit is something that I don’t think Washington is really taking into account yet. The White House has the ability to make news. The White House has the ability to say things and have a microphone. The more the president talks about the need to quickly get a lot of aid passed, that certainly helps.” There’s also the fact that Biden is signaling that he’s very open to cutting a deal. “The president is engaging in this process, and he doesn’t necessarily expect the final bill to be exactly like the one that he proposed,” the White House operative says.&nbsp;“But we do hope to get bipartisan support.” That could turn out to mean that Biden, in pursuit of 60 filibuster-proof votes, agrees to Republican demands that a new round of direct $1,400 checks be “targeted” to .Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to pass a budget resolution next week, the first step toward passing Biden’s COVID relief funding. The budget resolution will also be the first opportunity for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to stall, a tactic he and the Republicans have perfected. Schumer wants the budget resolution out of the way before the scheduled start of Trump’s second impeachment trial, on February 9—because if it isn’t, McConnell could claim the Senate is too busy to deal with two large issues at once. Republicans will try to whittle down the cost of the package; there will also be fights over Biden’s proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 and whether to exclude businesses from COVID liability. “We can’t let Republicans dictate, ‘Oh, this has to be bipartisan,’ because the longer you wait in an economic and health crisis, the more damage can be done,” the Senate insider says. “The Senate always works better when it’s bipartisan. But we are prepared to move without them if necessary.” That would mean Schumer uses a device called budget reconciliation, where approval would require a simple majority, merely 50 Democratic Senate votes, plus Vice President Kamala Harris. But it assumes that people like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin will stay on board.The Biden team knows that speed, in this case, will save lives. “We wish we could say today that every American could go get vaccinated. That’s not the level of supply we found when we arrived,” the senior administration official says. “It’s going to take a number of months. We have now purchased enough vaccine to vaccinate 300 million Americans. That’s good news. It’s going to require some amount of patience, but it should allow people interested in getting vaccinated to know the supply is being purchased.” If Biden can instill patience in Americans, even as thousands of people continue to die of COVID every day, he will pull off a feat nearly equal to taming the virus itself.More Great Stories From Vanity Fair&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;— Embedding With Pentagon Leadership in Trump’s — Donald From Women—And Then From America Itself— How Trump’s COVID Chaos Drowned the FDA in — Inside of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump— After Wrecking the Country, Vacation Plans— Can Trump’s Be Deprogrammed?&nbsp;— Trump Makes an Exit With His — From the Archive: How Donald Trump Against Him— Not a subscriber? to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.The freshest-and most essential-updates from Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.

Maybe my question was confusing. Or maybe California’s COVID response is such a mess, and the troubles the state is confronting are so numerous, that the senior Biden administration official didn’t know where to start his answer. “I’m not sure whether you’re asking about the vaccination program progress or about the public health issues about the new variant, so I don’t want to answer something that’s not being asked,” he replied tentatively. “I saw what you saw, which was the comments from the California health department that they were revamping the program to get more vaccinations out...

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Chris Smith started writing about gadgets as a hobby, and before he knew it he was sharing his views on tech stuff with readers around the world. Whenever he's not writing about gadgets he miserably fails to stay away from them, although he desperately tries. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

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Vanity Fair is a monthly magazine of popular culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast in the United States.  The first version of Vanity Fair was published from 1913 to 1936. The imprint was revived in 1983 and currently includes five international editions of the magazine. As of 2018, the Editor-in-Chief is Radhika Jones.

“When We Say Things Were Worse Than We Thought, That’s What We Mean”: Inside Biden’s Plan to Push Through COVID Vaccine Chaos

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