A news report yesterday evening talked about the problems that states have had with broken promises from the Trump administration. The states are guaranteed that they will get "X" number of doses by a specific date and they make rollout plans based on what they believe they will get. Then, shortly before the expected delivery date, the Trump administration simply reneges.
Part of the problem is that Project Warp Speed (the Fed’s vaccine distribution system to the states) switched from holding back second doses to shipping all available ones, based on the assumption that subsequent deliveries from the vaccine manufacturers would cover those second doses. When Secretary Azar announced this a few days ago, he didn’t mention that this policy had already been implemented for at least a week prior to his statement, and states expecting more doses because of this change found there weren’t going to be any beyond what they already received. I suspect that at least part of these ‘windfall’ doses were shipped to locations before their agreed upon delivery dates.
Another fly in the ointment is that the scaling up of vaccine production currently underway involves idling (part of) the production lines so that available vaccine is temporarily less than expected until production resumes at the new & higher levels, presumably sometime in February. This helps explain the reduction in deliveries to various countries and US states mentioned in the media during the last few days. The secrecy about all this maintained by various operatives in the Trump Administration didn’t help to alleviate the confusion.
