Trump's Vaccine Screw Up

 Carl Hiaasen

Fri, January 1, 2021, 1:32 PM EST

The day before returning to the White House for New Year’s Eve, Donald Trump played golf at his country club in West Palm Beach. He was there from 9:26 a.m. to 2:33 p.m., a leisurely round.

Meanwhile thousands of his fellow Floridians in the same high-risk bracket spent many of those hours strangling their phones, unsuccessfully trying to get an appointment for the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Others lined up early at inoculation sites, only to be sent home after supplies soon ran out.

“Operation Warp Speed” currently looks more like “Operation WTF.” The big rollout is rocky and slow throughout the country, but the only surprise is that people are actually surprised.

Given the hapless void of federal leadership, think of how many things would have to go right in order to vaccinate an entire population — or even, say, 70 percent — of 331 million people. The supply-chain logistics are mind blowing, the costs astronomical.

That there are even vaccines available is amazing, considering how new this virus is. Lots of folks remain skeptical about receiving the injections, and whatever decision they make will have Darwinian consequences.

With the grim winter surge in COVID hospitalizations, multitudes of informed Americans are rightfully worried about getting sick, and they want to get inoculated as soon as possible. The key to sanely enduring the next few months is to lower one’s expectations, keep your masks on and make friends with your phone.

Being a certain age, I have a vaccine hotline number on my speed-dial. It always rings busy, but I dutifully try over and over. The county where I live received only a few hundred vials and ran out within hours. Officials say they don’t know when more will arrive, but they’ll let us know.

The Trump administration had promised 20 million vaccinations by the year’s end. As of New Year’s Day, about 14 million doses had been distributed nationally and only 2.8 million Americans had received the injection.

Many states received smaller shipments than expected, and have pleaded for federal funds to help expedite and organize the mass vaccines. The president tweeted Wednesday that the government has done its job, and told the states to “get moving.”

Then he went to the golf course.

In Monroe, Louisiana, the family of Luke Letlow was planning his funeral. Newly elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Letlow died last week after being hospitalized with COVID-19.

He was only 41 and had no underlying health issues, according to doctors. He had a wife and two young children. That he was a Republican is irrelevant; the virus doesn’t care.

After all this time, predicting who will get fatally sick and who won’t is still dicey. Nationwide, about 344,000 Americans died from COVID-related causes in 2020 — substantially more than all the U.S. soldiers killed during World War II.

In Florida, where the death toll has surpassed 21,000, we have a governor who, like Trump, sidelined the infectious-disease experts, downplayed the breadth of the threat and ducked responsibility when the outbreak exploded.

And, like Trump, Ron DeSantis is now banking on the vaccine to sanitize his legacy of denial and misdirection.

The politicization of the pandemic has cost way too many lives, and at this point the jig should be up. Almost everyone understands that COVID-19 is far more deadly than common influenza, and almost everyone knows somebody who’s gotten seriously ill or died.

So of course the vaccine appointment hotlines are lighting up while the shots get administered in a relative trickle. Florida dispensed less than 25 percent of the 1.2 million units it received before Jan. 1. With no plan coming from Tallahassee, each county must patch together its own program.

That’s discouraging, but hardly shocking. For Floridians, any expectation of bureaucratic efficiency is unrealistic — ask anyone who spent weeks and even months trying to collect emergency unemployment payments on a state website apparently managed by stoned raccoons.

In the end, patience will win out because there’s no other way. Not all 22 million Floridians want to be vaccinated, but those who do — and aren’t in urgent need — will eventually be able to get their shots at a CVS or Walgreens.

The trick is staying safe until then. The state’s positivity rate for COVID-19 tests jumped ominously to 11.5 percent by Thursday.

While working on this column, I continued trying to phone my local COVID hotline, as advised. Finally the call went through, and a short recorded message said the vaccine was all gone, for now. Click.

Which was more helpful than a busy signal. But not much.