Well, this is scary, and yet, sadly not surprising. Morning Joe reports on the Trump administration's refusal to plan for Phase 2 of federal vaccine distribution, and it appears to be an attempt to undermine the incoming Biden adminstration.
"Let's bring in NBC News correspondent Heidi Przybyla with new reporting on federal vaccine distribution plans. Heidi, we're not quite at Phase 1 yet. But already concerns on what Phase 2 will look like. This is complicated," Mika Brzezinski said.
"I talked with numerous federal and state health officials and the picture here is becoming pretty clear that the Trump administration has really done a lot to try and ensure that Phase 1 goes smoothly," Przybala said.
"We have an existing infrastructure for doctors and nurses to get vaccinated at the hospitals and the elderly are stationary. They will get the doses and we have individuals from Walgreens and CVS coming in. And when we hit phase 2, there's an eclipse of planning when it comes to the responsibilities that should be held by the federal government that are not been planned for.
"I'll give you a few examples. I talked with so many state officials who are not just not aware of what any kind of standard, of what you'd expect, public relations outreach to try and organize a way to reach these communities that are already so skeptical that you talked about earlier in the show, to educate those populations, to target those populations. this one was a shocker.
"I also talked with the head of some of the state and local public health officials associations. They're not seeing the coordination because they say, 'Look, it's good that we're bringing the private sector in here. We like this coordination, but don't leave us out, okay? We're not getting the type of communications that we should be getting.' The funding, we talked about that. There's just no money to do this at this point. So Congress has got to get on the ball on that.
"And then again, another one that was really surprising was a lack of a really integrated IT, sophisticated IT structure to do this. Again, I talked with state and local health officials who say 'We knew that we were going to have to pull off a feat unlike we have seen in modern history and yet, this did not start.
"This type of planning did not start at the same time that the vaccine planning started, which is when it should have started, about nine months ago, and so at this point, I'm told it's really too late to pull all of this together. We have so many different types of local and state different health-type IT systems that not talking to each other. We are trying within the past 60 days at the federal level to integrate a lot of the information to the Tiberius system and a person said, "It's pretty obvious that everyone, including on Warp Speed, how this is going to go, and that is, that as early as February, this is going to fall off a cliff in terms of all the things that haven't been done to put Phase 2 into effect.'
"I said, 'Do you mean coinciding with Joe Biden taking office?' and this person said, 'I'll let you draw conclusions, but all of us who talk every day, it's pretty obvious how this is going down unless things change.'"
