[conspire] How bad COVID is in LA right now

[Rick Moen]

> 2. There are almost 20 MILLION doses of vaccine missing, which is
> probably a bigger issue right now.
> 
> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-biden-cdc-covid-vaccine-missing-b1792753.html 

Agreed -- a gobsmacking and bewildering story.  I keep checking for
updates, as I'm sure do you, but nobody's gotten any results yet, just
"We're investigating".

With something as time-sensitive and valuable and important as the
Pfizer and Moderna vaccine shipments, there's an obvious routine that 
I expect would be followed:  At each step of handling, someone signs off
on assuming responsibility for x amount of shipped product (with the
strong incentive to check that's it's actually present before signing),
and is responsible until someone(s) else accepts custody and sign{s)
assuming responsibility for specified amounts.  Later, if there is a
need to audit, you just backtrack up the chain of signatures until you
find a point where some mysteriously vanished, and that's where you
start sweating people.  Anyway:

  After a week on the job, Biden’s team is still trying to locate
  upwards of 20 million vaccine doses that have been sent to states — a
  mystery that has hampered plans to speed up the national vaccination
  effort. [...]

  Biden's team is still trying to get a firm grasp on the whereabouts of
  more than 20 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine that the federal
  government bought and distributed to states but has yet to record as
  being administered to patients.

  Only a small percentage of those unaccounted for doses — roughly 2
  million, two officials said — is due to lags in data reporting, the
  Biden team believes. That would mean the rest of the crucial supply is
  boxed away in warehouses, sitting idle in freezers or floating
  elsewhere in the complex distribution pipeline that runs from the
  administration to individual states. [...]

  It was not until after Biden was sworn in that the Covid response team
  discovered the system was blinded to much of the route that vaccines
  traveled from the government's distribution hubs to people's arms.
  Instead, once the vaccine shipments are delivered to the states,
  responsibility for tracking them has been left up to states’ individual
  public health systems. The administration then only gets an update once
  the doses are actually administered and an official record is submitted.

  “I think they were really caught off guard by that,” said one adviser.
  “It’s a mess.”

  Top Biden officials have stressed that the missing doses are spread out
  across the states, which remain largely responsible for getting them to
  the health providers charged with vaccinating the tens of millions of
  people waiting in line for shots.

  But the Covid team has since had to spend hours on the phone with
  various state officials trying to manually track down the unused doses,
  a time-consuming task that's sapped resources and has yet to give
  officials a full picture of where exactly supplies are going.

So, carelessly diffused responsibility, lack of communication, and
fsck-upitude inside the distribution chains of various states.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/30/biden-covid-vaccine-states-463953

Time for some rubber-hose interrogations?  ;->