Now that COVID vaccinations are becoming more widespread, and the initial panic about who is eligible to get them is subsiding, the media has suddenly discovered that mistakes were made.

And not only were mistakes made, they can’t all be blamed on the Trump administration. Remember how the early messaging from Team Biden was that the Trump team had “no plan” for vaccine distribution? And how they got called out on it by none other than their favorite doctor, Anthony Fauci? Well, he isn’t the only doctor saying that all the Biden administration did was tweak Trump’s plan.

Former Operation Warp Speed health adviser Dr. Moncef Slaoui claimed that 90% of the current administration’s coronavirus vaccine rollout plan is the same as what the Trump administration had laid out – despite claims that Biden inherited “no plan.”

President Biden’s chief of staff has insisted that the previous administration had no plan to roll out vaccines. CNN released a much-criticized report that Biden’s team was “starting from scratch,” but Dr. Anthony Fauci immediately dismissed such claims.”

Slaoui joined Fauci in debunking those same claims, instead insisting that the Biden plan is essentially the same plan that the Trump administration laid out.”

“I do think we had plans,” Slaoui told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Saturday. “In fact, 90% of what is happening now is the plan that we had.”

What the Biden administration DID try to do was push more federal control by promising “mass vaccination” centers. However, those promised centers have not come to pass. Why? Well, the same reason so many things have been slow when it comes to vaccine rollout. Supply. For example, in Oklahoma, two of these federal mass vaccination locations were supposed to open. State officials were thrilled – until they learned that there wouldn’t be any more vaccines allocated to go with them, and that the state would have to re-allocate from the supply that they got in order to have vaccines at these sites.

Mega-PODs (points of dispensing) were to function as a partnership among state and county health officials, FEMA and the National Guard. (Deputy Commissioner of Health Keith) Reed said during the press conference that the federal government did guarantee the supply — up until it didn’t.”

“The information we were given did very specifically say that the PODs would include federal allocation,” Reed said. “And then as we delved into it deeper and started reaching in and asking for more clarification about where the vaccine was coming from. We were told that the fact that there was federal allocation coming with that was actually ‘pre-decisional.’ And I can only assume that ‘pre-decisional’ means that they had the option to change your minds on it. So when we found out that it was no longer going to be (federal) supply with the mega-PODs, then we had to really evaluate our options.”

It really does come down to numbers. It takes 110 days to make the Pfizer COVID vaccine – though they are hoping to cut it to 60 days. Moderna and Johnson & Johnson likely have similar timelines. Now, they do have the ability to make hundreds of thousands of doses a day, but that still means that these production facilities are working around the clock to meet demand.

What the Biden administration expected was to be able to blame Trump and take all the credit. After allowing Biden to continue to stick his own foot in his mouth and insist that his team did it all, the reality is that nothing has gone as planned when it comes to distribution. And when it comes to getting shots in arms, the states bear the blame or get the praise for how they allocated the shots.

A surprising new analysis found that states such as South Carolina and Florida that raced ahead of others to offer the vaccine to ever-larger groups of people have vaccinated smaller shares of their population than those that moved more slowly and methodically, such as Hawaii and Connecticut.”

The explanation, as experts see it, is that the rapid expansion of eligibility caused a surge in demand too big for some states to handle and led to serious disarray. Vaccine supplies proved insufficient or unpredictable, websites crashed and phone lines became jammed, spreading confusion, frustration and resignation among many people.”

“The infrastructure just wasn’t ready. It kind of backfired,” said Dr. Rebecca Wurtz, an infectious disease physician and health data specialist at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health. She added: “In the rush to satisfy everyone, governors satisfied few and frustrated many.”

The CDC’s initial push for “equity” when it came to vaccination also made the rollout endlessly complicated. Science told us exactly who was at risk – the elderly – and prioritizing them should have been a no-brainer. Not in our woke culture and equity obsessed bureaucracy. Equity pushes are STILL happening in states like Colorado. And yet no one can be bothered to ask Kamala Harris about her own stupid anti-vax stance during the debates, which surely did nothing to encourage people to get vaccinated, and contributed to the skewed perceptions in a new Gallup/Franklin Templeton poll. The gist of the poll? Public health messaging has been very, very bad on COVID.

This is a shocking failure of public health authorities and media https://t.co/XTE28gEEEb

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) March 21, 2021

With poll numbers like these, it’s no wonder than people are panicking at the idea of getting back to “normal.”

It’s illustrative that this is the person who has been setting the NYT health coverage for the past year. “Reentry” I feel like we live on different planets. https://t.co/QiBl03FZIR

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) March 21, 2021

The reality is that COVID is not an automatic death sentence, and with more shots in arms, we are beating down the virus. The reality is that President Trump laid the framework for this with Operation Warp Speed and the COVID Task Force. The reality is that the states that focused on the elderly and vulnerable first are in better shape now. And the reality is that public health messaging has been so terrible, that public trust in those institutions may not recover for a long, long time.

Featured image via Alexandra_Koch on Pixabay, cropped, Pixabay license