Thread by @doctorow

Silver linings pop up where you least expect 'em. Like you, I've been worried about the chaos in vaccine distribution.

I'm not talking about the maniacs who blockaded Dodger Stadium to prevent vaccinations:

latimes.com/california/sto…

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Or the guy who literally thinks the sky is a hoax who destroyed 500 vaccine doses:

washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02…

Nor the man-child who turned Philly vaccinations into an incompetent grift:

npr.org/sections/healt…

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I mean the common, garden variety clusterfuck of the parts of the vaccination process that AREN'T being actively sabotaged - the parts that are being run by people who are trying their hardest, who want to succeed, and are failing anyway.

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After all, this mass vaccination is just the latest in a string of first-in-history long shots. The development of the vaccines was an incredible feat, but maybe we used up our supply of moonshot successes and we're gonna regress to the mean during the distribution.

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Or maybe not! Silver linings are weird. It turns out that Trump's top Health and Human Services officials lobbied against giving the states any money to help with vaccine rollout. The harder they begged, the louder the no.

statnews.com/2021/01/31/tru…

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The mass murderer Paul Mango served as HHS's deputy chief of staff for policy under Trump, and he was convinced that the states were faking it - that they were only begging for vaccine rollout funding to cover shortfalls in their general treasury.

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He insisted that they should just vaccinate millions of people, all at once, without access to federal funds. Just, you know, figure it out.

Here's why this is a silver lining: it's evidence that the problems with vaccine rollout were the result of sabotage after all.

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That as difficult as this first-of-its-kind vaccination program is, the reason it's been failing isn't that it's impossible - it's that Paul Mango and his co-conspirators did everything they could to make it fail.

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And THAT implies that now that Mango has been replaced by someone who doesn't want to murder millions of people, we might start succeeding!

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After all, the NHS just vaccinated 1.2% of the entire population of the UK IN A SINGLE DAY. Coordinating mass vaccination is hard, but it's looking more and more possible.

https://twitter.com/brianklaas/status/1355929218056679429?s=01

I'll take my silver linings where I can get 'em.

eof/