Politics

Biden administration unaware of location of 20M COVID-19 vaccine doses: report

The Biden administration isn’t sure about the location of 20 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine that have been sent out to states, according to a new report.

The CDC currently says it has sent almost 50 million doses to the states, but only a little over 31.1 million of that has gone into people’s arms.

But once doses are sent off by the feds, it has been left up to the states to track their whereabouts, Politico reported.

Biden’s team is still trying to locate the remaining 20 million.

About 10 percent of that difference, or 2 million doses, is missing because of lags in reporting from states, Biden’s team believes — meaning the remainder could be sitting in warehouses, in freezers, or in transit in the complex distribution network between the federal government and the states.

Biden — whose team has already come under fire for being unable to say how many shots the federal government has on hand — has insisted that the vaccine program left by the Trump administration “is in worse shape than we anticipated or expected.”

The missing doses could substantially hamper his goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days.

“It’s the Mike Tyson quote: ‘Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth,’” a person knowledgeable of the vaccine program told Politico. “They are planning. They are competent. It’s just the weight of everything when you sit down in that chair. It’s heavy.”

A member of the transition team argued that Biden officials weren’t given access to all the data during the handover from the previous administration.

“Nobody had a complete picture,” Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team, told the outlet.

“The plans that were being made were being made with the assumption that more information would be available and be revealed once they got into the White House.”