I told you so.
I thought from the getgo that having the federal government, under Operation Warp Speed, monopsonize the COVID-19 vaccine and then use central planning to distribute it at a zero price, was a bad idea.
I criticized the central planning way to distribute it in “Vaccines’ Last Hurdle: Central Planners,” Defining Ideas, December 4, 2020. I wrote:
If Walmart or Amazon put out a plan to allocate vaccines, I wouldn’t be so concerned. The reason is that they would have incentives for every step of the process. They would fire people for doing it badly and would pay bonuses to, or promote, people who do it well. But this is government. Will any government worker lose his or her job by knocking off at 5 p.m. on Friday instead of staying an extra three hours to get out ten more shipments of the drug? The question answers itself.
Well, guess what? The federal government is taking its sweet time.
Here’s Ronald Bailey on the issue:
In a statement, Pfizer rebuts rumors that there is a shortfall in doses for its vaccine due to production delays. “Pfizer is not having any production issues with our COVID-19 vaccine, and no shipments containing the vaccine are on hold or delayed,” notes the company. “This week, we successfully shipped all 2.9 million doses that we were asked to ship by the U.S. Government to the locations specified by them. We have millions more doses sitting in our warehouse but, as of now, we have not received any shipment instructions for additional doses.”
Adds Bailey:
Sadly, the federal government appears to be dawdling again while the toll of COVID-19 deaths, hospitalizations, and new diagnoses continues to rise ever higher. It’s not like there’s a pandemic or anything going on.
The belief in central planning lives loudly in so many of the people messing this up.
READER COMMENTS
Jerry Brown
Dec 17 2020 at 7:49pm
Are you sure the hold up is in the delivering of shipments of the vaccine? I mean just how many people can be inoculated per day in the US best case? There probably is a limited amount of people and places capable of doing the inoculations- even though they are getting paid for their work. The vaccine apparently needs very specific criteria to protect it at these sites and to administer it safely. Why blame this on central planning?
If my father is able to get the vaccine in the next month or two, and it is safe and effective, I am going to consider this vaccine development and implementation a reason to recommend certain government initiatives and planning- not a reason to criticize them.
Of course it would have been even better to have an effective vaccine earlier and there is a possibility that an unregulated design and testing and distribution of vaccines would have produced just as good a product as what we may get even earlier. But there is also a good chance it would have produced 500 really ineffective and more dangerous ones at the same time. Hoping the market sorts that all out in the way that causes the least damage is too much for me.
Ben Bursae
Dec 17 2020 at 8:52pm
I’m wondering, though, whether the best way to judge the outcome is whether your father gets it in a month or two. I understand the need to personalize things and I understand that you care dearly about your father. But millions of people have fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, sons, daughters, and friends whom they care about, many of them caring as much as you do about your father.
If there is a holdup due to fewer personnel, I understand your point. But it’s probably not rocket science to give someone a shot.
Jerry Brown
Dec 18 2020 at 12:07am
Yes Ben- it was a mistake to personalize this as far as my concern for my father. And since we haven’t figured out how to change the past maybe the best thing we can do is learn how we can do better in the future. Or present. There are some difficult questions that well meaning people can still disagree about for sure. It would be extremely doubtful that the process of providing these vaccines could not have been improved on.
Jon Murphy
Dec 17 2020 at 8:00pm
It’s a carbon copy of what happened with PPE back in March.
Henri Hein
Dec 18 2020 at 1:46pm
This reminds me of a time the company I worked for was doing some on-site consulting at a government agency. On my first day on the site, one of our consultants said to me: “don’t stand in the hallway between 4:45 and 5. You’ll get trampled in the stampede.”
Charlie
Dec 18 2020 at 5:28pm
Biden’s inauguration will be a great experiment in whether you are correct, and it is the government that was the problem, or if you’ve missed the mark, and it was the Trump administration that was the problem.
Marc Joffe
Dec 18 2020 at 9:37pm
We already have some idea of how a Democratic government performs on COVID-19: California state and large county governments. Intelligent minds may differ, but personally I think they are doing an awful job.
Comments are closed.