Why the chaotic vaccine rollout
Why is anyone surprised that the rollout of the two vaccines approved by the FDA is moving at a snail’s pace? Every aspect of the U.S. response to Covid-19 has been a disaster. Why should vaccination be any different?
The cause of this failure is the same as that of all the other catastrophes that have characterized the pandemic in the United States. Imagine if in World War II every army, division, regiment, company, and platoon had been charged with developing and carrying out its own strategy and procuring the needed war materiel. The result would have been a fiasco that would have made the Bay of Pigs seem like a success.
Early in the pandemic, President Trump declared that he was a wartime president, with the new Coronavirus the enemy. His strategy throughout has been the one described in the preceding paragraph, a formula for our calamitous outcome.
Trump’s role in all this has been supreme but the debacle has deeper sources. Steve Bannon and other extreme right-wingers often have asserted their desire to “deconstruct the deep state.” The reality, however, is that for a generation the Republicans have been busy deconstructing and demonizing the state at all levels and depths. The goal has been a government so small “you can drown it in a bathtub.”
Much of that objective had already been achieved by the time the pandemic hit. A minimal state is incapable of confronting a crisis of the magnitude of the Coronavirus pandemic. Trump and the GOP were not interested in reconstructing the state they had spent decades dismantling. All the failures—to develop and carry out a national plan; to implement and enforce effective public health mitigation strategies like lockdowns, masking, and social distancing; to test a significant proportion of the population; and now to vaccinate more than a small fraction of the 20 million the administration promised would be inoculated by the end of 2020 have a singular cause. That cause is the laissez faire GOP ideology—each person for himself or herself, and the hell with the common good—and its inevitable result: an ever more impotent state unprepared and unwilling to win a war with a deadly and unrelenting virus.
