This isn’t surprising, but still, damn:
As they were settling into the White House on Wednesday, Biden administration officials were reportedly stunned to discover that President Joe Biden’s predecessor didn’t have a plan with regards to distributing the COVID-19 vaccine.
A source told CNN on Thursday morning that the new administration will “have to build everything from scratch” thanks to former President Donald Trump’s reported lack of strategy with the vaccine rollout.
“There is nothing for us to rework,” they said.
Biden will have to start from “square one,” said another source, who called Trump’s nonexistent distribution plan “just further affirmation of complete incompetence.”
I doubt the Biden peeps are truly surprised. It’s been obvious for months now that vaccine distribution keeps getting pushed down to the next level with no overarching coordination. It’s happening in Trumpy-ass states like Florida too, with DeSantis shoving responsibility down to the county level with no resources or oversight.
We’ll need hearings on this massive failure at some point, and accountability for the incompetence that will cause so many needless deaths and unnecessary suffering, but first, time to clean up the mess. Open thread!
waspuppet
Foisting the hard jobs off on the underlings and hitting the golf course: Trump really did run the government like one of his businesses.
MattF
Just another lie. Not remotely surprising.
jackmac
Just the first of many surprises left by the Trumpsters.
Cameron
Yeah, I saw this morning (forget where) that DeSantis said he doesn’t want any COVID help from the Biden administration. Great. I feel safer already. I did note that his big vaccine roll-out w/Publix, etc. is in Palm Beach. Gee. I wonder who’s in Palm Beach that merits that attention?
Cacti
I’m sure the Biden team can come up with something relatively quickly to cover the logistics.
What concerns me is the 70+ percent of the population we need to take the vaccine voluntarily for the herd immunity effect to kick in.
I think that’s going to take some carrots and/or sticks.
dmsilev
I think a more accurate phrasing would be “Biden had to start from square one”. He and his team must have suspected this was the case months ago just on general principles, and confirmed it as soon as the transition was officially underway. “Further affirmation of complete incompetence” is spot-on, though I suppose malevolence is also an option; maybe we’ll find out that Jared was selling vaccine shipments to anyone willing to pay for them.
debbie
Can we be sure the vaccine plan simply wasn’t misfiled? The plan could be in the same drawer as Trump’s health plan and tax forms. //
Skepticat
@waspuppet:
Had the underlings been even marginally competent rather than mewling sycophants and toadies, it might not have been quite so bad.
Keith P.
There was a vaccine plan, but it was for Trump to win reelection while the vaccine just supplemented the ongoing herd immunity effort…while getting 72 holes of golf/week.
Hildebrand
It may actually be easier this way – no corrupt officials to toss out of the way, no bad practices for folks to unlearn, just release the plan that they must have already in hand, and let everyone know how it is going to work.
Stomping on recalcitrant Republican governors will be a gift to the Biden administration, as they can simply say, ‘don’t you want your people to stay alive?’, and sit back and watch folks realize in real time that Biden was serious about governing for all people.
rp
Like a lot of things with Trump, it’s something we all predicted and expected, and yet is still absolutely stunning when confirmed. There’s knowing and KNOWING.
randy khan
Given the level of incompetence, no plan probably is better than whatever plan they might have had. There’s nothing to undo, so this removes one level of complexity from the process.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Well, of course, he couldn’t be bothered to plan this. He had important things to worry about, like who was being mean to him.
Fuck, I hate these fucking people.
narya
@Cacti: I will tell you that, based on the funding opportunities I’m seeing, people at multiple levels of government and in multiple arenas recognize that “vaccine hesitancy” is and will be a thing–and they’re encouraging folks to come up with strategies.
citizen dave
It’s a massive failure. They F’d our country in so many ways. I saw Gov. Whitmer talking yesterday and she said they can vaccinate 50,000 per DAY, but are only getting 50,000 does per WEEK. She said at the current rate it will take TWO YEARS to vaccinate everyone in Michigan.
I am refreshing my state’s eligibility page often as 60-69 is the next group. I was just on my 100K city’s vaccination page, and noticed the hours for vaccination are T and TH 9 to 12; and Sat 9-3. In an emergency that is killing thousands and hurting our economy, they are only vaccinating 12 hours per week. The orange team had no shit together AT ALL to deal with the vaccine rollout. WTF?
rant over.
Soprano2
I agree, no plan is probably better than any plan Trump’s incompetent staff would come up with. This makes it even more likely that they envisioned some kind of “Hunger Games” competition for vaccine among the states, with them helping the ones that voted for Trump and hindering the ones that didn’t. I think Trump only cared about trying to take credit for the creation of the vaccine, and cared not at all whether the vaccine actually got in anyone’s arms after his own people were taken care of.
VeniceRiley
I’m hoping they’ll tie most of any monetary relief efforts to vaccine compliance.
dmsilev
@citizen dave: Yeah. California said yesterday that with the current rate of supply from the Federal government it will take until June just to get everyone age 65+ vaccinated, never mind the rest of the population. Bear in mind that by June, Pfizer and Moderna put together are supposed to have supplied 400 million doses of vaccine, enough for about 2/3s of the whole country.
VOR
Krugman is predicting this lack of policy will be found throughout the Trump “administration”. Someone called it a hollow administration or a Potemkin administration with nothing behind the appearances.
artem1s
Oh, there was a plan. They just couldn’t put it on paper for fear of adding to the list of indictments the traitor tots will have to face now that His Excellency is out of office. Does anyone doubt they were selling them to the highest private bidder?
JCJ
Yesterday I received my second dose. Feeling a bit more tired than usual with some soreness at the injection site. Very disappointed that I did not grow a prehensile tail.
Brachiator
This just reinforces my anger and disgust with respect to all the dopes who believed, and still believe, that Trump did a great job.
But it also reinforces my confidence in Team Biden.
Yep. Trump only cared about personal glory and pageants where loyalists lavished him with praise.
I am so happy to be done with all that nonsense.
patrick II
@Hildebrand:
I thought that would work with expanded Medicare. It didn’t. The have let thousands rather than succumb to the FEDs or government driven by Democrats.
Plus, one of the things that would blow back on DeSantis, as the FEDs become more involved and informed while in fighting COVID in the states, is DeSantis’s dishonest and partisan efforts so far.
They don’t care about the people that die, they do care about covering their ass.
BruceFromOhio
OPERATION WARP SPEED: GOING NOWHERE, FAST!
@JCJ: Watch for the third eye.
SFAW
@JCJ:
That usually doesn’t happen until the fourth day after Dose #2, so your disappointment may be premature.
Old School
@JCJ:
But then your pants wouldn’t fit properly.
Scamp Dog
@citizen dave: What city are you from? I grew up in Saginaw, many years ago.
The Moar You Know
This is the most appalling lack of “not even trying” I have ever witnessed; I mean, I thought the orange motherfucker would at least give enough of a shit to do the bare minimum to try to get re-elected, but he, like most criminals, just thought stealing it would be easier (protip: it never is).
Half a million dead people. And probably another half million before we can get it under reasonable control.
Four more years of this would have destroyed the United States. Thank God we got Biden and Harris over the finish line. We at least get a chance to get this pandemic beat. I suspect most of the actual work we’d like to see Biden/Harris get done will be in the second term; beating this fucking thing is going to require a national effort pretty similar to WW2.
Nicole
@JCJ: Congrats on the second dose! That’s great. And I’m sorry to hear it did not give you new appendages or superpowers.
SFAW
I have sometimes revised Fuckhead’s “I could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose support” assholery to be “kill 500,000 people across the country.” But I’m starting to think even that number was way too low.
And 74M motherfuckers voted for that piece of shit. They better hope I don’t become god-emperor anytime soon.
Omnes Omnibus
@JCJ: Yet. Full effectiveness takes time.
Barbara
@Cameron: DeSantis will have his hand out as fast as any other governor, although it would be sweet to see Biden take him up on that, and just redirect funds to other states for their own roll out.
It’s going to be interesting in 2024, to see whether complete fealty to Trump or its opposite will pay more dividends. DeSantis probably couldn’t distance himself from Trump even if he wanted to, but since I have been targeted by various Republican polling and fund raising outfits I can see that Nikki Haley is on the fence before deciding to jump into one pool or the other.
schrodingers_cat
I want to know if the Orange person was getting a bounty for every dead American. His repsonse to the pandemic has been one of malevolent inaction and deliberate sabotage. If he had done a half way decent job, hell if he had just let the CDC etc do their jobs we would have had far fewer peole dead. His actions were not politically expedient either
Negligence doesn’t account for the active hostility towards mask wearing and other prudent measures.
citizen dave
@Scamp Dog: I only saw Gov Whitmer on tv, but I’m claiming her as my adopted governor. I’m a Hoosier lifer (so far, could change for retirement); grew up in Fort Wayne. Go Komets!
Love Michigan though, especially Traverse City. I’ve never been to Saginaw–looks like it is thumb-adjacent.
MisterForkbeard
@JCJ: Okay, but what new limbs DID you grow if not a tail?
rikyrah
I am just going to say it.
I told you so.
That they had no plan.
That the plan was to recreate Spring 2020 with the Hunger Games amongst the States.
Remove PPE
Insert Vaccine.
The plan was HERD IMMUNITY.
They wanted the schools open so that the kids could infect the adults.
They planned on profiting from the vaccine, as they used it to punish the Blue States.
You have more cases than anywhere else in the world and you TURN DOWN THE OFFER OF EXTRA DOSES FROM NOT ONE, BUT TWO COMPANIES.
WHY do that, if not to create a ‘ shortage’, and to use that ‘ shortage’ to punish your enemies.
Tired of people saying that they didn’t have a plan.
That denotes incompetence.
It was never incompetence.
It was always DELIBERATE MALICE.
Barbara
@BruceFromOhio: It was an achievement to prioritize and fund vaccine development, but it bears noting that other countries have also been able to develop other vaccines, although lack of transparency in data is an issue. Russia, China, India and UK all have one or more vaccines developed by entities headquartered in those countries, and they are vaccinating their citizens with those products. Even the Pfizer vaccine was developed by a German company, which chose Pfizer as the partner for its further testing and approval. We really could do with a lot less self-congratulation on that front. And distribution was always going to be a challenge, which is why they didn’t bother. They have never done and basically don’t know how to do anything that requires serious hard work.
Robert Sneddon
The UK government was getting dragged recently for announcing some vaccination centres would be opening 24/7. It would be a waste of money and effort, the critics claimed. They shut up after it was pointed out a lot of shift workers including people in the food industry, delivery drivers etc. would only be able to attend a vaccination centre at night or in the early morning because they’d be working otherwise.
CarolDuhart2
I’m usually an optimist, but I’m stunned by this. No plan at all? I figured it was a couple of pages badly written or even ad hoc. The only positive thing is that by having no plan, nobody has to end a bad one
I’ve had a strong feeling this neglect is near-genocidal. The idea was to purge the blue states of those undesirables who wouldn’t vote for him. And hopefully bring in folks from Europe or more desirable locations-but of course nobody from the EU wants to come here to a place that would be less liberal than conservative European nations.
jonas
Wasn’t there some brigader general or something in charge of the vaccine rollout? The guy who apologized when the government fucked up its production numbers a few weeks ago? What happened to him? Or was he just like a Potemkin logistics director?
Frankensteinbeck
@Barbara:
By 2024 nobody will remember Trump except those of us who hate him, and we will all take it for granted that every Republican is guilty. Mind you, this could be tens of millions of people. On the Republican side, it will be “Trump who?” except standard right-wing practice is to not even acknowledge the question.
Betty Cracker
@The Moar You Know: The death toll is already as high as WWII, and I suspect you are right that the effort required will be similar too. Only this time, fighting Nazis is a side-gig!
Robert Sneddon
Chimpanzees don’t have prehensile tails so the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, which is based on a chimp adenovirus, cannot provide prehensibility. Sorry.
Nicole
@schrodingers_cat: Trump is a combination of control freak and Maynard G Krebs-level lazy. There was no work done on the pandemic because he didn’t want anything done he wouldn’t get full credit for, but in order to have that he’d have had to actually work. As he doesn’t really care about other human beings, on either an individual or collective basis, it was no biggie for him to ignore it.
Benw
@rikyrah: and they knew the vaccine worked because they pushed their way to the front of the line, while barely distributing it!
eta: I wonder what the Biden team will find on the classified servers? Was Kush aware enough to erase the really illegal stuff?
gvg
Republicans live by magical thinking and incomplete thinking. I think they didn’t even realize vaccines didn’t just get to people without a plan.
I first noticed this in people who complained about taxes for schools after their kids grew up, and never thought I need educated doctors, nurses and air conditioner repair men myself until I die, plus if there are no schools, all the people who do ANYTHING for you all the way back up every supply chain have kids that need school. If there are no schools, every parent in the area will leave.
And Businessmen who complain about taxes who don’t think where they will be without road so goods can get to their store or people can come buy. If there are no cops and courts, no one will keep a contract and everything will get stolen. Money that isn’t counterfeit and banks that don’t lose your money are not “free” and cost something to maintain. too many people assume this is all just there, with no cost share and no work.
Trumpies are just the most extreme fools of this type. I would guess they didn’t even know they didn’t have a plan. They thought their saying we want this to happen, made it so. They don’t like to think. Whereas I enjoy figuring out things.
tim
Those clowns couldn’t organize a 2-man circle jerk.
That crew could fuck up a wet dream.
Ain’t had sense enough to pour piss out a boot with directions on the bottom.
(I got a million of ’em, folks.)
Barbara
@Robert Sneddon: The problem is that the same people are also expected to do testing and everything else that they were also required to do before. They also have to have people wait around for some period of time for allergy management purposes, and they might need additional or different personnel for that. They might not even have enough vaccine to administer for more than 12 hours per week. Not defending their lapses, but vaccination distribution is more complicated than just lining people up to give them shots.
The Moar You Know
@schrodingers_cat: I would have dismissed this idea as wild-ass conspiracy theory up until about a year ago. I don’t now. I think his response was of a certainty deliberate, and very likely paid for. Because if he’d just done nothing, just gone golfing and let the experts deal with it, this would have been over by this summer at the latest and he’d be president right now.
The only thing that gets to take a seat in front of Donald Trump’s ambition is his greed. So if he torpedoed his shot at getting re-elected – and he must have known that would happen if he didn’t deal with COVID, nobody, not even his kids, are that stupid – then he got paid for it and paid well.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
Ditto. This news is what I expected. When we first heard of the military involved in distribution, I said it made sense that the Trump Administration was doing absolutely nothing, and the military was trying to pick up the slack and do the best they could in an area where they had no expertise.
VeniceRiley
I hope J&J and NovaVax are ramping production now in advance of approval. If anyone wants a vaccine and cannot yet get one, I encourage them to sign up for the NovaVax phase 3 trial currently enrolling. They’re doing 2/3rds real vaccine vs 1/3rd placebo. And they want more minorities and medically vulnerable populations.
CaseyL
This is one of many bullet points I hope the Biden Administration emphasizes, repeatedly, in press briefings and in the SOTU address: Everything had to be built from scratch.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
also, the things he was a control-freak about wound up biting him in the ass. If he had taken the time and attention he spent trying to spin Hunter Biden into an issue and put it into calling for large cash relief, and leaking information that was probably available to him about vaccine development, we might have seen a very different election. Beating up on Hunter appealed to his conspiracy-addled, tabloid-addicted, sadistic nature, the people who had his ear were making bank on the stock market, and all that sciencey stuff bored him.
sixthdoctor
Just called my senators (MD) to congratulate them on being in the majority, remind them to punish the Senate insurrectionists, and ask that they vote for filibuster reform/elimination. Voicemail for Van Hollen, polite reception for Cardin.
schrodingers_cat
@Frankensteinbeck: @rikyrah: This
Sheer ineptitude does not explain their pandemic response.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat:
Good point. The stuff Biden is now proposing — masks for 100 days, social distancing, etc. — could have been promoted by Trump early in the pandemic at negligible cost and saved untold numbers of lives. So why did he shoot himself in the foot by politicizing those issues?
I keep coming back to the explanation that covers most of his antics: he’s a dick. He probably heard Fauci or Cuomo or Whitmer or someone encourage people to wear masks and socially distance, so he dickishly took the opposite approach because he’s a dick.
stacib
@Cacti: I know of only two people that are taking the vaccine, and I work at a huge pharmaceutical company in addition to family and friends. Nobody neither trust the vaccine, nor the folks who are going to be administering it (we’ve heard they will be recruiting / training folks without a medical background, but they’ve given insulin shots). Many of us have had negative experiences with the medical profession, and I’m not talking about 60 years ago. As a black woman, I know the difficulty of trying to get all your questions answered without many sighs of exasperation or non answers. I’ve been rushed through so many doctor visits that I don’t go anymore – they are not comforting nor do you feel as if your health matters. I’m on the “wait and see what happens to other folks bus”. Not helpful to the general population, I clearly understand that, but until I can have some faith that I matter and that I’m entitled to all information relating to what goes into my body – I’ll wait.
Barbara
@The Moar You Know:
No, it would not have been over. It’s not over in other places in the world. It turns out to be a fantastically complicated problem given the specific nature of the virus, among other things. The ONLY places that are truly back to normal are outliers, such as New Zealand and Australia.
What it would have done is reduce the number of deaths. And seriously, I can’t be the only person who believes that Trump stopped caring at all when it became clear that the virus disproportionately affected poor people and people with dark skin. Likewise, his base became floridly, aggressively indifferent for the same reason.
wvng
To me this bodes well that the Biden team will not be shy about exposing the Trump administration’s failures. It really is essential to have all the malfeasance on the public record.
Brachiator
@The Moar You Know:
Trump is that stupid, and his kids are totally deferential to their father. Trump is a man of many fears and resentments, and he is ruled by them.
He seems to have a huge problem with illness and suffering, with the idea of being hurt or wounded. His response to the pandemic, and his search for miracle cures, was not rational.
The sick and the dead are not real to him. They must be ignored, avoided.
If he were still in office, he would likely have Young Jared set up some scheme to sell the vaccine to the highest bidder, or roll it out in higher quantities to red states.
That he bungled the pandemic response so badly reflects his ongoing psychological deficiencies.
Frankensteinbeck
@schrodingers_cat:
Callous malice and laziness combined with ineptitude does. It is and has been standard Republican behavior, blown up to Trumpian levels. They don’t like helping people, have a hard time grasping that it might be in their self-interest, and are reluctant even then. Or, as @Betty Cracker so eloquently puts it:
That’s the only explanation you need.
SFAW
@schrodingers_cat:
Mrs. SFAW — who, until recently, was much less cynical than I — said that she wouldn’t be surprised if the “missing” vaccine doses in the “reserve” had been given to Shitgibbon pals, so they could re-sell them. I have a tough time disputing that idea.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JCJ: I had my b-day dinner with madame and the kid last night, the kid had her second shot last week. She said her experience was pretty much the same, except she started running a fever of 102 the second day.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Betty Cracker:
I think Occam’s Razor applies wrt masks. He has a maladjusted, daddy-issue-warped 13 year old bully’s notion of manliness (he’s Nelson Muntz), and masks are wimpy. trump exacerbated the meat-headedness around them, but he didn’t create it. It seems pretty widespread in Europe, too. I’m old enough to remember, and have been a meathead about, seatbelt mandates (I was a teenager).
Paul W.
The only thing that would have surprised me is if they actually HAD a plan, they’re the laziest and most distracted group of people ever to run our country and they are more spurred to action by supplicating to Trump than by the 100s of thousands of people dying outside their walls.
The good news is that Biden’s team planned of just such a thing, and despite the weird needs of people (*COUGH* NATE SILVER) to try and play armchair epidemiological-logistics hitting 1 million vaccinations a day is not a “done deal” and if we do eventually exceed the 100 million goal it won’t be because it was easy and Trump had most or even any of the work done.
Frankensteinbeck
@SFAW:
If so, we’ll find out in the next few months. I’m getting the strong impression that Trump and his stooges are so profoundly stupid and were so obsessed with overturning the election, that they forgot to destroy the evidence. Even I thought they’d be smarter than this.
Robert Sneddon
@Barbara: Oh, it’s a lot more complicated than most people realise but everyone’s a critic so you get a lot of “why isn’t it working?”
We’re getting people reporting that vaccination centres here in the UK have “no-one getting vaccinated and lots of people in fluorescent jackets just standing around doing nothing.” Yes, that’s how it is, they are waiting for people to get appointments and to start turning up and for deliveries of vaccines and syringes and the workers need training and the facilities need equipping and ninety-five thousand other things but all they see is people standing around so they complain.
There are all sorts of weird technical issues that are difficult to make clear to people — for example in the UK we have three authorised vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna which are mRNA vaccines and Oxford/Astrazeneca which is based on a non-infectious-in-humans coronavirus. They can’t all be administered using the same types of syringes and needles since the dosage amounts for the two different vaccine types are different. That means a vaccination centre has to have enough of the right types of syringes and needles to match the vaccines being injected. It’s better if they have way too many of both types of syringe and needle to start with but they can’t be interchanged. Someone has to keep track of this sort of thing, check the right syringes are being used and there are enough on hand to deal with all the customers expected that day or that week. That’s just one of the fun details, there are, I am sure, many more.
Brachiator
@Betty Cracker:
Behind the show and bluster, Trump is an astoundingly stupid man. His understanding of science is less than elementary school level.
You see this in his quick grasp of quack remedies. His mind naturally runs to conspiracies and pseudoscience.
Trump also has a fear of disease and a fetish about body integrity.
I had a co-worker who honestly did not believe in germs. He thought that not getting sick was solely a matter of willpower. Trump is very much like this.
Trump was also insane enough to believe that he could control reality by decree.
And he’s a dick.
JCJ
@Old School:
I am going to go with the Baud approach – who needs pants?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
There was that, but a huge part is shere useless laziness. If the Trumptwits were merely malicious they would have had a plan for those they favored. Administration headed by a lazy bum who staffed it with lazy bums.
Trump and his supports are a pack of human trash who are failures, know it, and their one goal in life is screw everyone else.
ColoradoGuy
Still think DJT was getting a bounty (or debt relief) for every dead American. The “incompetence” went far beyond random activity. The anti-mask effort was the most dominant thing the GOP propaganda machine did; if there was any “signature” feature to the GOP marketing message, that was it. They even sponsored armed insurrections against mask-wearing. That’s pretty effective messaging.
That’s not neglect or incompetence; that’s genocide. Historically, not that different than giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans.
Brachiator
@jackmac:
Fixt.
marcopolo
The local rag (StL Post Dispatch) announced today that our Gov, Parsons, is now planning on using the National Guard to implement mass vaccination sites in MO. My guess is Parsons is taking his cue from the Biden Admin. Parson’s been such a Trump toady over the past few years that I imagine our state’s crappy Covid strategy & response to date has been related to not wanting to draw the ire of Trump and that now he’s out of the way there is a clearer path to taking more appropriate steps to dealing with the crises.
Keeping my fingers crossed since I’d really like to get vaccinated by the end of April.
Brachiator
@Cameron:
OK. No vaccine for Florida. They can buy it on the open market.
ETA: No, I would not deny Florida the vaccine. But I wonder how their governor would react if this was the alternative?
Kelly
The first mass vaccination center in Oregon, at the State Fairgrounds in Salem, has paused for a couple days twice since it opened 2 weeks ago due to using up supply on hand. There’s more at some warehouse but the cold storage requirement is more difficult than I anticipated. Even if they up the rate and drain the warehouse supply it’ll still be the end of 2021 before vaccinations are complete. More mass vaccination sites opening in Portland and Eugene.
Soprano2
I completely agree. Whatever we would have had, it wouldn’t be the government we’re familiar with now.
rikyrah
I had a discussion with the pharmacist at the CVS in my office building. He was like, yes, of course, they are going to have to use CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, etc, to help distribute the vaccine. Only way to get it to the masses. Won’t all go through them, but, they will be a large distribution point.
Somehow talking to him calmed me this morning.
The thought that we now have people working in our government who actually don’t want to kill us is a big relief. I know it will take time, but, now knowing that people want to save our lives – goes a long way for me.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
The total lack of a plan leaves me enraged but not surprised. It’s a familiar feeling, one I’ve felt a lot over the past few years, and one I expect to feel again and again as more revelations come out.
Biden’s due to deliver a State of the Union address fairly soon, right? Constitutional duty and all that? I’ve speculated elsewhere that it’s probably going to be the first SOTU to get rated M-for-Mature for language. Seriously, he’d be justified in using language fit to strip the paint off the walls of the Chamber of the House.
germy
Can you imagine if #45 had been in charge during the polio vaccine rollout?
We’d still be waiting for it, and we’d also be learning Jared bought stock in iron lungs and leg braces.
trnc
I also doubt they were surprised to find no Covid plan, and I would prefer they say that, and that this is likely the reason no one on DT’s side wanted a transition. Help the public connect the dots between professional republicans and incompetence.
germy
This thread is funny:
Not what I expected.
Soprano2
@rikyrah: Well, they didn’t have a plan they could actually write down, but I completely agree with you. They wanted to figure out a way to a) profit from the vaccine, and b) punish Trump’s “enemies” with it.
Geminid
@Brachiator: trump is no strategic thinker, but he did have a low political cunning that could sense the opportunity to whip up his base with anti-government hysteria. When I read the stories of participants in the insurrection, I was not surprised to see that many were involved in anti-masking demonstrations. trump was a skilled demagogue who knew his base. Fortunately, that’s about the only skill he had.
germy
He had a stretch limo lined up and everything. He’s bitterly disappointed.
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
I saw a message on my shopping app that the pharmacies in Vons supermarkets will be offering the vaccine. Fine by me. Get it out as widely and as quickly as possible.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I woke up this morning with the phrase “science based policy” on my lips. Which made me remember my favorite chant from the March For Science:
“What do we want?” “Science based policy!”
“When do we want it?” “AFTER PEER REVIEW!”
It will be amazing to have science guiding our science policy. It already is.
The Moar You Know
@Barbara: Oh, you are not. I would have cheerfully murdered whoever at the CDC let that info out; I’m sure they were operating from the best of motives (I am actually in no way sure of that) “oh, these are the people who need the most help, let’s help them!” But even the densest of people would have known that the instant that data became public, Trump and the GOP were going to throw up their hands and say that there was nothing to be done and nature must take it’s course. Which they did.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Listening to Angus King with Andrea Mitchell. He wants sixty votes on Covid relief, sounds skeptical on Biden’s ask, but I heard him earlier today on NPR– gonna look for a transcript of that one later– and while he’s no firebrand, he’s putting the onus of compromise on Mitch McConnell.
He also said he expects Lloyd Austin to be confirmed this afternoon. That surprises me. The whole waiver issue has fallen off the radar.
And he is pissed about the trump riot. You could safely bet all your quatloos he’s going to vote to convict.
KenK
@dmsilev: @18:
Pretty much same here in Erie County, NY. The County vac-site cancelled three days worth of appointments last week. I’ll be 70 by the time I get my *scheduled* vaccine on March 21. Fortunately, my wife got her 1st vac a couple weeks ago, so she is getting near to ‘completion’.
citizen dave @ 15:
Yeah, the sparse hours are a concern, but if you only have < 20% of promised vaccine on hand, it doesn’t make sense to be open a lot of hours
Elizabelle
@JCJ:
Yet.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Geminid: Trump had an awful lot of help from a whole ecosphere of grifters who explained away Trump’s blatant short comings to his marks. Take Q-Anon as an example were the die hards are now claiming Biden serketly’s is working for Trump.
jonas
My guess is that it comes out that Trump’s plan was to shamble around with the vaccine rollout, hoard all the doses, and then use it to extort blue states. “You want a vaccine allocation? Eliminate all your sanctuary cities.” Or whatever they think they could get. That’s absolutely what Kushner and Miller wanted to do.
Elizabelle
Haven’t read the thread, but I would think that some of this malfeasance is actually criminal.
If the GOP could stage months of fake ass hearings over Benghazi!, I think we should have some federal, Congressional, and state investigations into this level of negligence in a pandemic.
Do not forget all the politically-connected Republicans with no experience in logistics of medical supplies lining up at the trough.
A lot of people may need to be nailed to the wall so hard that no future administration is ever tempted to evade their public responsibilities so fatally.
A lot of information can come out. And: Democrats actually can multitask.
Frankensteinbeck
@ColoradoGuy:
Of course. “Fuck you liberals for not catering to my whims, especially those to hurt others” is practically the centerpiece of Republican voter philosophy, and what got Trump elected. Everything about wearing a mask was a natural target for Republican hate. It required them to inconvenience themselves to help others. It helped others, period. Liberals wanted it. Science and facts were yet again being deployed to say they were wrong about something. By not wearing masks, they could grind their boot in the face of everyone who dared to not do things their way. It made them look just slightly silly. Not wearing a mask activated the toddler “Nuh-UH!” satisfaction. Most of these arguments apply to social distancing and quarantine policies also.
rp
I have to take issue with the claim that Trump screwed himself by not letting the experts handle the pandemic, and that the botched response cost him the election. He’s a moron, but he has an animal cunning when it comes to giving his supporters what they want. I think he gets that his supporters are selfish bastards who don’t want to make any sort of sacrifices (like him), and so he quickly took the position that the virus wasn’t a big deal and that no one needed to change their behavior. (and of course he didn’t want to panic the markets.) By opposing lockdowns and masks, he played into and encouraged the anger of people who were upset by the pandemic, job losses, and hardship, and I think it actually helped him in the election. Of course it didn’t help him enough to win, but I think it’s a big reason he got several million more votes than he did in 2016 and increased his support among Latinos. (All just a guess of course; I have no hard evidence.)
Edit: God damn it. Frankensteinbeck beat me by two minutes.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
is that Q-Anon or Rose Twitter? or has the moronic convergence occurred? I did see a couple days ago that some idiot at Jacobin had written a “While of course I don’t agree with them, Q-Anon makes some good points…” piece.
trnc
Would love to think so, but I’m afraid I have to disagree. Stealing usually is easier for these guys.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Those people are so weird.
Geminid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: There were plenty of volunteers on his bandwagon, but trump’s campaign also had an effective social media effort to amplify his demagoguery. This microtargeting helped to steal the 2016 election, and it never ceased. The Biden/Harris campaign did not have the money to counter it until last August, and in states like Florida that was too late.
Ghost of Joe Liebling*s Dog
@JCJ:
Old story from a Robert Benchley biography I read long ago :
Benchley had acquired what the book referred to as “a bad cold,” and when his doctor visited him (!), the doctor said he wanted to try a new treatment that had only recently become available; he was very curious to know how well it would work. I think it was Penicillin …
At any rate, Benchley got an injection, and the doctor said he would return that evening to see how things were going.
Benchley and a friend of his devoted part of the afternoon to preparations for the return visit.
That evening, the doctor came back and found Benchley resting under a blanket … the doctor asked him how things were going, and Benchley said things were fine, just fine … “but what about this?” and threw back the covers. He was naked underneath, except for the feathers which he and his friend had taken from a down pillow and glued so as to entirely cover his body from the waist down.
I don’t remember anything about a prehensile tail but apparently the effect was … memorable … even without one.
Another Scott
Water is wet. Film at 11.
I, like others above, have to believe that this was expected, and they’re trying to hit the ground running.
In other news, …
rofl.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Geminid:
Yep. Totally agree.
Also, Trump had a surprising ability to attract loyal followers. But zero ability to attract competent loyal followers.
Betty Cracker
@rp:
Could be. Among the many untrue notions (IMO) that are hardening into conventional wisdom is that Trump would have sailed to reelection if not for the pandemic. I don’t think that’s so. Polls (unreliable, I know, but they’re all the data we had at the time) had him losing even before the pandemic. You may be right that it actually helped.
Baud
mrmoshpotato
@Betty Cracker:
What a dick move by a dick.
laura
Individual 1 had a Covid plan – let it kill as many people as possible and find a way to monetize it. And because Individual 1’s fragile masculinity mask wearing was equivalent to walking around with a large Kotex box on your head.
As disappointing as it is – a what no one is or should be surprised about the total absence of a plan is that it wont take any effort or time to undo and whatever plan the Administration had ready and waiting can be implemented. Operation warp speed my aunt Aggie.
mrmoshpotato
@wvng: Yes! Biden and Harris won’t be shy about any vaccine-related “What the fuck is this shit?” discoveries from Dump’s bastard administration.
Suzanne
A group of us discussed this yesterday on the zoom call: there has been zero logistics work done because logistics are difficult, boring, uncontroversial/unexciting, and expensive.
There are failures at every step. No one knows how much vaccine they’re getting at any given time, so no one knows how much storage capacity they need. They don’t have space for freezers, they don’t have freezers anyway, and even if they did, they don’t have backup generators for the freezers. They don’t have space or fuel for the generators. God forbid one of these generators (if someone has one) catches on fire. We don’t have enough medical glass vials because we don’t have enough equipment or capacity. We can’t recycle them in quantity because we haven’t arranged that process. We don’t have enough super-cold storage vehicles. On and on it goes…. because the LAST ADMINISTRATION did not think of any of this!
God, so annoyed.
ET
What is sad beyond all the dead that we will have now that we have a vaccine many of whom may needn’t be dead, what is also sad is that while the vaccine was being created/tested we had the time to prepare for the roll out. There are bureaucrats in federal agencies that could have been allowed to do their job and who were wanting to do this job for this but were prohibited in various ways by the appointed heads of the agencies and the previous president.
As much as the cultists and deniers want to believe otherwise, the history of the previous administrations failure regarding COVID on every single level will be well documented and that record will be something that looks even worse in retrospect.
lowtechcyclist
@Frankensteinbeck:
I wouldn’t say ‘no expertise.’ The U.S. military are probably the world champs with respect to logistics.
If you want to move a whole lot of supply of any sort from one or two Points A to ten thousand Points B, and the U.S. Army is willing to do it, then fer Chrissake step out of their way and let them do it.
@sixthdoctor:
Thanks for the nudge – I’ll do the same this afternoon.
mrmoshpotato
@JCJ:
This is the right conclusion.
trnc
He told everyone before the election he didn’t want to do the actual work. He literally told us how bad he was going to be and republicans didn’t care.
Anotherlurker
@MisterForkbeard: No new limbs for me, but, after my 2nd dose I took a nap and when I awakened I picked up my guitar for a little practice. After warming up, I jumped into a flawless, smoking rendition of Leo Kotke’s “Ojo”.
And then I really woke up. :-(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN73p0nIMDo
sab
@ET: So much commentary is about how this pandemic is unprecedented, unlike anything since 1918. That probably isn’t true. We have ways to control outbreaks before they become pandemics, even without vaccines. We have done so at least 3 times already this century. What is unprecedented is that the US didn’t bother this time: Trump and crew actively shut control measures down. Last time US governments ( federal and states) were this active in denying an impending epidemic was indeed in 1918.
Archon
The Trump administrations Covid strategy all along has been informed by the idea early in the pandemic that it was primarily a blue state problem and an “urban” problem.
citizen dave
@Suzanne: For anyone interested in stoking their rage, revisit the November 60 minutes piece with General Perna, etc. You need CBS All access to watch, but they’ve helpfully included the transcript. Example:
David Martin: This country did not do a good job of containing the virus. Why should we expect you to do a good job of distributing a vaccine?
Paul Ostrowski: Because we’ve learned from the past. And we’re hopefully gonna do a heck of a lot better job this time.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-vaccine-distribution-60-minutes-2020-11-08/
randy khan
@BruceFromOhio:
[nerd alert]They forgot the dilithium crystals.[/nerd alert]
leeleeFL
@rikyrah: I always feel enlightened by your analysis of complexity. I have no doubt at all that you are correct!
And…good morning?!
lowtechcyclist
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
In these chants, the answer to “When do we want it?” is always “NOW!!” Which made the “AFTER PEER REVIEW!” that much more perfect.
I also remember what a cold, wet day that was in D.C., and at least in my part of the march, we were occasionally chanting:
We’re nerds! We’re wet! We’re really, really upset!
Which always goes through my head when I think of the March for Science.
It’s like waking up from the worst dream ever, isn’t it?
Jinchi
Trump lost what little interest he had in Covid-19 after he survived his own bout with the virus and was no longer worried about personally dying from it. He took it as proof of his superior genes (not the extraordinary medical care he received). Besides, if he caught it, it was hardly fair that the rest of us might not have to.
And he was never going to think about it again. Had he won the election he would have continued to ignore corona, since it would have proved he was ‘right’ about herd immunity.
Having lost the election he had even less interest in dealing with the problem, since Joe would get all the credit and the country had betrayed him anyway.
rp
@Suzanne: As the saying goes, amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics. Tactics are fun and relatively easy; logistics is hard but where all the real work gets done.
randy khan
@The Moar You Know:
Trump is pathologically incapable of letting anyone else have the credit for anything. It literally would have been impossible for him to just let the experts do their job, because then it wouldn’t have been him, Him, HIM.
The tragic irony here is that Presidents get credit for other people’s work all the time, so he would have been better off if he’d just let them get it done. And it turns out that in practice giving people other credit tends to work to your benefit, not your detriment. But again, since he’s never ever done that, he would have no idea about it.
Brachiator
@Suzanne:
I have worked for a couple of companies where excellence with respect to logistics was essential. And so I don’t see this as necessarily difficult or expensive (agree on the boring, etc).
Potential failures. But easy to avoid or adapt to.
The Trump fools were singularly inept at getting things done.
What has been somewhat surprising is the inability of some state and local officials to adapt. But it is much harder when the federal response is inadequate.
We are also seeing some failures in European countries. It is tough to get this thing handled.
Frankensteinbeck
@Jinchi:
Everything you said, but this is especially insightful.
ballerat
The plan was to parcel out the vaccine as rewards for those who flattered him the most or acceded to his demands. It was to be the quid of quid pro quo.
Winston
No plan? I thought their plan was to infect as many people as possible. Scott Atlas method. Won’t someone please arrest and prosecute him and his accomplices for mass murder?
Kathleen
@Brachiator: Kroger will also vaccinate through the Little Clinics.
Warblewarble
Operation more warp than speed.
Kathleen
@Kathleen: Kroger vaccinating in VA, WV, and Wisconsin now. Plus other states. Trying to get grocery workers on first tiers.
Soprano2
I have heard that he doesn’t like the way masks look on people’s faces, and considers using them “weak”. What’s so dumb is if he had just gone to a press conference, held up a face mask, and said “I don’t like the way these look, but if we wear them we don’t have to have shutdowns and fewer people will get sick and die”, and then slapped one on his face when he was in public, a) he probably would have been re-elected, b) many fewer people would have died, and c) many businesses that are out of business now would still be around. Figures it was his vanity that got in the way of doing the best thing for him!
wombat probability cloud
I think that takes an extra ten days or so.
Soprano2
Boy, I sure do hope you’re right about this, because so far we have had zero leadership on COVID from the state government. I’m lucky I live in a city where the leadership listens to doctors. The hospitals here are full of people from surrounding towns where there are zero rules for anything, no mask requirements or group size restrictions.
The Moar You Know
@Winston: My wife’s first question on seeing this was “can he be charged?”
Not a federal law lawyer, or in fact any kind of lawyer, so I don’t know, but I’m betting the answer is “probably not”. However, I am more than open to contrary opinions on this, because frankly I think the son of a bitch not only should be put to death for mass murder but that it should be a public execution.
I think there might be more of a prosecutable case against Scott Atlas (again: not a lawyer) and that he needs to be gone after hard.
Soprano2
The anti-mask people call them “diapers” and “muzzles”, which tells you how they think about them. Wouldn’t surprise me to find out some of them call them Kotex.
BruceFromOhio
@gvg:
Tried to explain that to my conservative non-Trumpy bro-in-law. He played dumb until I said, look, I like civilization and I’m willing to pay to sustain it, are you? That shut him up.
Wapiti
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: In the first year of a new President’s term, they often skip the State of the Union, since the new person has been in charge for only 2 weeks. I expect to see one this year, though.
citizen dave
@Wapiti: Hell to the Yes for SOTU. But I hope he continues the shorter length speech like yesterday. There is no reason the SOTU should be an hour or more (looking at Bill Clinton).
Re: trump and masks–yes! He loves branding, why didn’t he realize the branding opportunity created by the mask–a red “45” mask; maga, etc.
It’s just so weird that the R politicians weren’t on the “masks=less virus spread=better economy” track
Not hearing a word in Indiana about alternate vaccine providers (CVS, Kroger, etc.). It would be nice. I asked my doctor’s office the other day and they said they weren’t doing it. Asked because their prerecorded message made it sound like they were. My health provider system was recently bought by Ascension if anyone has advice on that one.
Tenterhooks
Republicans have a weird disdain and suspicion of “public” health, epidemiology etc. Trump has a knee-jerk opposition to anything that involves planning, data-crunching and coupled with his “positive thinking” led us to this no-plan free-fall disaster.
JoyceH
@Wapiti:
I believe it’s traditional for the new president to address a joint session of Congress early in his term – it’s just not CALLED a State of the Union address.
Winston
@The Moar You Know: He can be charged. There is certainly a large amount of public statements and email evidence. Is Merrick Garland up to the task? Fortunately we now have firing squad thanks to Trump
Robert Sneddon
Most folks who requote that leave off the hard part of the trifecta — “winners study finance.” It’s great to have a fantastic logistics operations but wouthout the wealth, the productivity, the pipeline of stuff feeding the logistics operation then it just doesn’t happen. Logistics is sexy, accountancy not so much. It’s why I claim General Eisenhower was the most successful CPA in history thanks to his organisation of D-day.
ballerat
@schrodingers_cat: I’ve wondered that too. I think he also knows it mostly kills the people he doesn’t like.
I have little doubt he was getting a cut of every bounty paid on our servicemen and women. They’re “his” service people, and if someone is willing to pay for killing them Donnie will want his cut for “gifting” to them the opportunity.
Scamp Dog
@citizen dave: It is. I’m out in Colorado now, and Mom moved up north to a very small town about 15 years ago, so I haven’t been back to Saginaw (except passing through) in ages.
Quiltingfool
@marcopolo: Gov Parsons is still a simpleton, but if he is getting with the program wrt vaccination, good. I agree with you that as long as Trump was around, he wasn’t going to go against him. Methinks he will be one of the Republicans who are going to pretend that Trump never existed.
sab
@Robert Sneddon: Finance without logistics is dangerously ignorant. See Gov Snyder and Flint MI.
catclub
It’s happening in Trumpy-ass states like Florida too, with DeSantis shoving responsibility down to the county level with no resources or oversight.
I just got a shot – in mississippi – and I am 60 with co-morb. I thought there would be no shot, even thought I had an appointment. now I have an appointment for shot #2… we shall see.
catclub
@Winston: Can we get the full Mueller report out? Does it say he can be charged if he is no longer president?
ballerat
@rikyrah: Absolutely. It was obvious by March.
The lack of a plan was by malevolent design.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@citizen dave:
At a guess, Cleek’s Law bit them in the ass because what liberals wanted was for Americans to not die of COVID in horrifying numbers.
Chris Johnson
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I got out of Rose Twitter specifically because I worked out there were too many of them being run by the same people running QAnon. Now I watch for that: there’s a whole series of angles used to establish left-wing bonafides while simultaneously railing against electoralism or any functional governance.
I just figure we’re at war. The reason Trump did nothing to roll out vaccines even at the cost of his own rule, is he wasn’t working for us. He was a loose cannon and incapable of following direction but he could be bullied away from things and towards other things, and the one doing the bullying was Putin 100%, and the purpose was to make Americans die.
That’s still the purpose.
Working as intended. My hope is that the folks in power now have a clue (like Hillary did the whole time). It would be nice if they trusted us with that clue and with the truth, though I fear they want to keep it on the low-down. Seems like maybe now would be a good time?
Hillary knew. Pelosi knows. All this is not really surprising or shocking if you grant that we got conquered from the inside, and Russia ran the place for Trump’s term, remotely and on a long loose lead. There was no need to micromanage things with a Donald Trump blundering around. That’s why he was there.
ballerat
@Archon: Yes.
We know Trump understood covid and the consequences of an unchecked pandemic because Bob Woodard taped Trump talking knowledgeably about covid, its methods of transmission and its deadliness. He’d been accurately informed.
This idea that Trump was too stupid to understand it was a convenient lie. It lets him off the hook for genocide. And it lets people off the hook who didn’t want to accept what Trump really is, a psychopath who committed one of the worst genocides in human history.
J R in WV
@Benw:
On professionally administered servers, when you delete data,, it gets a delete flag set, and a date of deletion set, but the data never goes away, it just gets flagged as gone, and you don’t see it anymore. So I would expect all that data to be right where it should be ~!~
catclub
yeah, but what about servers in the Trump white house?
Gin & Tonic
@J R in WV: Plus any professionally-managed data center has multiple generations of backups. In addition to full audit trails of who accessed/modified/deleted what files when. It’s very very difficult to make something disappear without a trace – certainly a lot more skill and effort than anyone in Trumpworld has exhibited on anything.
I can retrieve any file that was deleted in the last 18 months from a multi-terabyte cluster in a matter of minutes.
J R in WV
@ballerat:
This. Trump quit planning for vaccinations the instant he learned it appeared to infect more people of color in blue cities than “his people”.
Genocide, plain old felony murder, I don’t care which, but everyone involved working for Trump should spend months or years watching their prosecution unfold on the evening news. Same for Cruz and his fascist Theocratic buddy Josh.
The Pale Scot
@Barbara: There’s still the race for peak narcissistic fabulist to be won, Dump showed how it’s done.
@Robert Sneddon:
Ala;
The education secretary, Gavin Williamson, has claimed the UK was the first country in the world to clinically approve a coronavirus vaccine because the country has “much better” scientists than France, Belgium or the US.
Williamson said he was not surprised the UK was the first to roll out the immunisation because “we’re a much better country than every single one of them”.
Asked whether Brexit was to credit for the world-first, Williamson told LBC radio station on Thursday: “Well I just reckon we’ve got the very best people in this country and we’ve obviously got the best medical regulators.
“Much better than the French have, much better than the Belgians have, much better than the Americans have. That doesn’t surprise me at all because we’re a much better country than every single one of them, aren’t we.”
ColoradoGuy
Just got my Moderna shot at the local King Soopers/Kroger. It wasn’t on the app, but it was on the Web page, provided you pawed through a long list of in-store pharmacies and found a store that had them. They had it at one store at 136th and Colorado Boulevard (in Thornton), so I signed up a couple of days ago for the first available slot, which was 11:15AM today. All of the questions on the on-line questionnaire were repeated on the in-store form, but you also had to show a current Medicare card.
Felt weird and strange being in a grocery store after self-isolation began on March 5th last year. Wore a double mask in the store, surgical-style inner mask, and cloth outer mask, following the lead of the press conference last night and a number of the Biden people. Just to be extra-safe, took off my clothes and washed them after getting home.
The shot itself was nothing. The needle is so thin you don’t feel it. No dizziness afterward, and feel fine some hours afterward. No tail yet.
The Pale Scot
Hey Betty, Publix is opening up registration for vaccine appointments at 6am tomorrow
ballerat
@Betty Cracker: I have to disagree. He’s a psychopath not a dick.
He is a psychopath or a sociopath or antisocial personality or what ever the clinical name is for someone who is highly manipulative, has little thought for consequences often even for themselves, only thinks of themselves and their immediate wants, and has no empathy or concern for the lives of others and never feels remorse.
Or as Mary Trump described him: “If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died”.
That is a succinct description of a monster.
We know from Woodward’s tapes he understood perfectly how the virus spread. But he took the opposite approach wrt to masks because he had staked his fragile ego on publicly denying it was serious and because he did not care nor feel any remorse if that approach resulted in tens thousands of people dying and he also knew it was to his advantage that covid was killing mostly people who didn’t vote for him.
That’s not Trump being a dick. That’s him being a monster.
Tehanu
Maynard wasn’t lazy, his mind was just on higher things. Dump’s mind is incapable of even recognizing higher things.
I agree. Somebody suggested he got paid to mess this up, but if he had, he’d actually have done a better job because he is incapable of doing anything right. No, the whole history of how he’s responded to the virus just looks like his typical flailing, spinning 360 degrees at every turn based on how he thinks he’s going to look. Too right there was no plan.