Tweet

Richard H. Ebright

6 Feb, 10 tweets, 2 min read

Frustration Is Spreading Faster Than the Vaccine Is

America’s distribution plan--designed by imbeciles and run by imbeciles--is no more fair or logical than a Soviet-style queue for cabbage.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

"Signs..we live in a dying superpower are all around us. Officials..make illogical, chaotic decisions; and everything is much more complicated than it needs to be. Could no one have invented an app or..website that assigns people to..vaccination sites in order of priority?"

"Is it impossible for [a state] to..take direct control of the process, and order its National Guard to give out the vaccine at schools? How about letting the..oldest people get their shots first—as..orderly countries have done—before opening up the system to a million others?"

"We’re on opposite sides of..country, but at 3:59 pm eastern..my sisters and I are sitting in front of..laptops, poised to start clicking refresh, refresh, refresh..Every few days at 4 pm..site releases..new..vaccine appointments, and we’re hoping to score two for our parents."

"The game is to get through the preliminary pages, to answer pointless questions (Why does it matter what insurance they have? Can’t you ask later?), to write in addresses and ages..in order to get as quickly as possible to the page that has real dates and times."

"One day last week I actually got through, my hands almost shaking as I clicked on an open appointment. Yes! Eight in the morning! Perfect! Then the page went blank and showed an error message. When I tried again, all of the appointments were gone."

"One day this week, I wake up at 6 am and click on the website of the Hyattsville Giant.., a supermarket..listed on the Maryland COVID-19 website as a provider of vaccines. No appointments available. I click on the Upper Marlboro Safeway website, also listed. No appointments."

"I try the websites of Giant..and Safeway and Rite Aid stores all across Maryland—all listed. No appointments. I call a Walmart that is listed too, out on the Eastern Shore. No appointments. Why 6 am? Because someone..said they got an appointment at the Waldorf Safeway at 6 am"

"I registered on the county’s website, of course, then never heard anything back. If I ever get any responses, they take the form of automated messages: Don’t call us. Don’t write to us. Don’t show up without an appointment. We can’t say if we have a waiting list."

"[T]hose of us who reside in this new version of Moscow, circa 1975, have to scoff at quasi-optimism. Beat COVID-19? With a bunch of dysfunctional Safeway websites? With dozens of different institutions, each one requiring different forms and a different registration?"

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More from @R_H_Ebright

Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

6 Feb

"Warp Speed held..ideological belief..federal government should..hand..off responsibility for..vaccinations to..states. The program’s mantra—'federally assisted, state managed, locally executed'—was adhered to..slavishly"

How Vaccine Roll-out Was Bungled
vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/h…

To Ashish Jha..of..Brown University..the insistence on offloading responsibility to..states looks less like a reasoned plan than a deliberate evasion tactic."

"'It’s very clear that the feds..didn’t know or care whether states were going to be able to do this or not. If states can’t do it, [they could] always blame them. And that has been the strategy from the very beginning.'"

Read 4 tweets

Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

6 Feb

"China’s experience has underscored the advice that many experts have suggested but few countries have followed: The more quickly you bring the pandemic under control, the more quickly the economy can recover"

nytimes.com/2021/02/05/wor…

“In many countries, debates have raged over the balance between protecting public health and keeping the economy running. In China, there is little debate. It did both.”

"The success has positioned China well, economically and diplomatically, to push back against the United States and others..It has also emboldened Mr. Xi, who has offered China’s experience as a model for others to follow."

Read 4 tweets

Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

6 Feb

We’re still missing the origin story of this pandemic.
China is sitting on the answers.

A Chinese institute must be opened to investigators.

Opinion by the Editorial Board
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

"[T]here is another pathway, also plausible, that must be investigated. That is the possibility of a laboratory accident"

"Wuhan..is a..center of virus studies..with at least six..BSL-3 laboratories..some..very active in coronavirus research."

"To find out if there was a..lab..accident at..WIV..or another lab, investigators would want to..examine..lab notes, records of experiments and data, intra-laboratory communications.., as well as bat samples, viral strains and all sequences"

Read 15 tweets

Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

5 Feb

"One model that COVID-19 vaccine updates could follow is that of seasonal flu vaccines..Generally,..threshold for updating flu vaccines is similar in magnitude to..changes in neutralizing..responses that researchers have linked to the 501Y.V2 variant."

nature.com/articles/d4158…

"Moderna..said..it expects to..rely on clinical trials involving 100s, rather than 1,000s, of participants to push forward with..vaccine against..variant. Foroohar expects that it will take..company..about 5 months to go from producing..new vaccine to submitting.. to regulators."

"Like Moderna, other coronavirus vaccine makers have said that they are looking into updating their vaccines. They include Johnson & Johnson of New Brunswick, New Jersey, which is developing a single-shot coronavirus vaccine."

Read 4 tweets

Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

31 Jan

Taiwan: 0.3 per million (7 deaths)
China: 3 per million (4,636 deaths)
Singapore: 5 per million (29 deaths)
South Korea: 28 per million (1,420 deaths)
Hong Kong: 24 per million (178 deaths)
Japan: 44 per million (5,546 deaths)

US: 1,400 per million (450,381 deaths; +3K daily)

New Zealand: 5 per million (25 deaths)
Australia: 35 per million (909 deaths)
..
UK: 1,600 per million (105,571 deaths)

Nations that successfully suppressed outbreak include both small and large, both island and non-island, and both autocratic and democratic.

Sole relevant parameter for success or failure is whether government took prompt resolute action (success) or whether it did not (failure).

Read 5 tweets

Richard H. Ebright

@R_H_Ebright

19 Jan

"As most nations around the world struggle with new lockdowns and layoffs in the face of the surging pandemic, just one major economy has bounced back after bringing the coronavirus mostly under control: China. The Chinese economy rose 2.3% last year"

nytimes.com/2021/01/17/bus…

"The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicted last week that the country’s economy would expand 7.8% this year. If it does, it would be China’s strongest performance in nine years."

"Keeping the virus at bay has been critical to China’s economic success over the past year. While the pandemic ravages other nations, Beijing’s aggressive top-down approach kept the virus from spreading rapidly across the country."

Read 4 tweets

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