The US rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine has not gone well. As of this post’s writing, the United States has only administered 3.71 doses of vaccine per 100 people.
Israel currently leads the world at 29.43 vaccine doses administered per 100 people, and even the United Kingdom is at 6.65 doses administered per 100 people.
Writing for Business Insider, Aylin Woodward suggests that US health officials spent too much time creating complex prioritization schedules to determine who could be vaccinated. Those rules, in turn, have created uncertainty and hesitancy on the part of health care providers who, in some cases, have destroyed vaccines rather than risk administering them to the “wrong” people.
Experts like Dr. Peter Hotez, a molecular virologist from Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, also argue that the complicated CDC guidelines of which Americans should have priority access, and when, have scuttled the US’s vaccination efforts.
“A massive vaccination campaign won’t work with our current fussy and intricate criteria for who gets a shot and when,” Hotez wrote in a piece for The Washington Post Monday.
Instead of hiring ethics experts to create Byzantine rules on who should get the vaccine first, the US should have hired logistics experts to create a plan to get the vaccine administered as fast as possible nationwide.