Thread by @ezraklein

I’ve been doing a bunch of reporting on vaccine distribution, and there are a few things that experts inside and outside the administration seem to agree on:

Welp, something failed in the posting here: let's try again!

1. The Trump administration did some real good with Warp Speed, but did very little planning for distribution. The situation the Biden admin walked into was chaotic.

2. The vaccine manufacturers remain confident that they can deliver the doses they’ve promised, and the expectation is supply will ramp considerably in coming weeks

3. Federal funds are needed, but there’s quite a bit the Biden admin can do to accelerate distribution through executive orders, personnel deployment, communication, etc

4. There’s also new vaccines that could come online soon — like AstraZeneca, or J&J — and different dosage regimes that could be considered if supply becomes the constraint

So with that in mind:

We are now roughly at 1 million shots a day, which puts the Biden admin on track for their 100m shots in 100 days goal — before doing much to fix these problems! bloomberg.com/graphics/covid…

That means the 100m in 100 days target is *much* too low. I understand the political incentive to underpromise and overdeliver, but low targets can be dangerous, because they can trick you into believe you’re succeeding when you’re not.

And particularly with the more contagious strains spreading, the benefits of a faster rollout would be huge, and the costs of a slower one…I don’t even want to think about it.

I’d like to see a politics where an admin could set an actually hard-to-reach target, as private firms do, in order to push the system as far as it can go, and be judged on how close they came. I know that’s not how our politics works.

But targets much higher than 100m are completely plausible here. 100m can’t be the goal. It’s the status quo, and the status quo isn’t good enough, as the Biden team is the first to admit!