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City, state and federal, the anti-pandemic effort is an utter shambles, with both rhyme and reason conspicuously missing.
Back in October, Joe Biden solemnly vowed “to shut down” the pandemic once he became president. Now that he’s in the Oval Office, he’s finding it a lot harder, saying Friday, “There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”
By Monday, he’d switched to vowing to have enough vaccine for all who want it by the spring — even as his team says they don’t even know how many doses are on hand. Shouldn’t they have started getting a handle on that on Day One? It should certainly come before drawing up plans for “equity” when it comes to who gets jabbed and vows to share the US supply with Third World nations.
Ron Klain, the new White House chief of staff, claims a process to distribute the vaccine “did not really exist” when the new team entered the White House. But when CNN ran with that story, everyone from Politico to The Washington Post to Dr. Anthony Fauci debunked it.
Biden’s big pre-election vow was to dole out 100 million vaccines during his first 100 days in office — which is actually slower than the rate achieved before he was sworn in.
Yet, when The Associated Press’ Zeke Miller asked last week if 100 million vaccines was too low a goal, Biden snapped: “When I announced it, you all said it wasn’t possible. Come on, gimme a break, man.” Now the president is vowing to have enough by . . . sometime in the spring.
Meanwhile, New York City is not only putting on ice its plans for mass-vax sites at Citi Field and Yankee Stadium, it has closed several centers that had been running — after it told people to go back to where they got their first jab when they were due for their second. And the online registration process remains a horror, as even Mayor de Blasio now admits.
City Hall also can’t say how many teachers have been jabbed, even though the mayor says getting educators vaccinated is the key to reopening all the schools.
Gov. Cuomo, meanwhile, just announced that New York seems to have passed the worst of the latest COVID surge, so he’ll start relaxing some lockdown restrictions — but absolutely not the ban on indoor dining in the city. And never mind that the rest of the state, even areas with higher rates, suffers no such ban and his own data show that restaurants aren’t significant virus spreaders.
It all brings to mind Casey Stengel’s famous plaint, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
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