After the Biden team took office yesterday, they revealed that one of the most shocking things they learned during the transition was that the Trump administration had no plan for the distribution of coronavirus vaccine doses, CNN reports.
“There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch,” one source told CNN.
The Trump administration unprecedentedly blocked Biden transition team access to government operations, with many thinking that it was because of Trump’s insistence that he actually won the election. It seems that the interference was to prevent Biden’s team from learning how incompetent Trump plans were across the administration.
During the transition, Biden’s team was careful not to publicly criticize the Trump administration for fear that what little they accomplished would have been stopped. Now Biden inherits a system that has no available doses in reserve and a supplier network awaiting orders for vaccines.
Trump publicly abandoned overseeing distribution of the vaccine, putting the responsibility on the various states without outlining a national strategy on what populations to prioritize or even what states should get priority. It was reminiscent of the immediate impact of the coronavirus, when states fought one another, the federal government and private institutions for a limited supply of PPE and other key equipment needed to treat patients.