Why? States have known since this summer that a vaccine was coming, likely by the end of the year, and somehow they have all neglected to prepare.
We've got what is by all measures a modern miracle, an answer to the most horrifying global event of the last century, given to us by a bunch of scientists who have been working nonstop for the last year to give it to us, and state health workers are doing things like taking weekends off and only opening a single vaccine site.
And then they also seem to concerned about fairness WRT to the vaccine distribution that they are willing to simply let this literal miracle go to waste on a shelf, rather than accidentally give it to somebody who didn't deserve it.
The way that almost every state seems to be treating these vaccines are not in any way in alignment with what I would expect from the worst pandemic in the last 100 years. It is infuriating.
"Specialty distribution is not something you can easily scale in a short period of time."
You admit distribution is something that can increase over time, so it should be plainly obvious that capacity will increase as time moves on (as opposed to staying stagnant or slowing down), especially considering everyone involved in the process has explicitly stated it will.
The additional vaccines that are close to approval give us further reason to expect the rate of vaccinations to increase significantly.
We have no reason to believe the current rate of vaccinations will remain stagnant or slow down, and many reasons to believe it will increase significantly in the coming months.
> Specialty distribution is not something you can easily scale in a short period of time
That doesn't mean that you can't scale it at all, and one would assume that scaling over a super short period of time (like, weeks) is harder than scaling over a slightly longer time span (like months).
On that basis, is it not fair to assume that there'll be at lease some non-linearity in production and distribution rates over the next year or so?
Yes, it seems like ultimately the distribution problem will come down to communicating who can get vaccinated and when. Like right now I have been hearing scattered reports that there are places where doses of the vaccine are available and not being used. So if I wanted to go get one could I? I'm certainly not in any demographic that should be prioritized, but if it's just sitting there then someone should use it.