Viral Inflexibility.

• Author: Soupcoff, Marni

There is one thing you can count on government to be lousy at, even during the emergency of a deadly viral pandemic: being agile.

As of this writing-in the middle of the winter, approaching the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization's declaration of a global pandemic, with COVID cases in the United States sliding easily past the 26 million mark, and two COVID vaccines having been given emergency authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration months ago--the government is trying to figure out what the heck happened to millions of doses of those vaccines.

It's not that they got lost. At least, not exactly. The government is reasonably sure it knows where they went and what became of them. It's just that the answer--"sitting untouched in hospital freezers or else poured down the sink"--is not very satisfying.

Even the craftiest of spin doctors is incapable of making the numbers look good: SO million doses of vaccine were delivered to the states by early February, but only about 31 million doses were injected into people's arms by then.

That would be a lousy record if this were some middling consumer good like Google Glass or New Coke. But it's an inoculation against a deadly disease that has devastated the world. Having 38% of it languishing on shelves or dumped out when demand is raging is a feat of clumsiness that only government could accomplish. And the United States is not alone in this; other developed nations with much-ballyhooed health care systems are having their own troubles administering the vaccines.

Much of the problem stems from red tape. Dr. Daniel Griffin, a physician-scientist who has been on the frontlines of the fight against COVID since the beginning, complained on Twitter that in his home state of New York, "it takes more time and effort to do the currently required electronic upload to the state immunization information system than it takes to vaccinate."

On the podcast This Week in Virology, Griffin related his elderly mother's experience getting vaccinated. She found the process frightening and uncomfortable to begin with--issues that would be mitigated if people could just go to their own doctors to get their shots. Then, when a small error was discovered in her paperwork (her birthday was recorded incorrectly), the entire process was put on hold while the powers-that-be consulted with each other about how to handle the discrepancy. How many people could have received vaccinations in the time it...