Vaccines were a chance to redeem failures in the U.S. coronavirus response. What went wrong?
By Lena H. Sun, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Frances Stead Sellers, Laurie McGinley, Amy Goldstein, Christopher Rowland and Carolyn Y. Johnson
Two promising coronavirus vaccine candidates were speeding through trials in September when the country’s top public health agency invited states to submit plans describing how they would get the shots to millions of people. It was an opportunity, eight months after the United States confirmed its first coronavirus case, to redeem the nation’s devastating failures in organizing a regimen of testing, contact tracing and equipping medical workers with protective gear.
“We have the time to take the lessons learned from the last six months and apply them forward and get it right,” Soumi Saha, a pharmacist and advocate for cost-effective health care, said on that optimistic mid-September day. “The one thing we know for sure is a fragmented approach does not work.”
But that is precisely what the nation got. Health departments and hospital executives are struggling to compensate for decentralized planning, complaining that they were not given enough money to prepare for missions that are becoming increasingly urgent as the coronavirus pandemic reaches new peaks. The United States recorded more than 4,000 covid-19 deaths on a single day last week.
