Also, they paid a lot to have early access to a lot of vaccine.
Michigan (my state) is doing about 35,000 doses on weekdays at this point, which is frustratingly slow. But if they had spun up twice as fast, we wouldn't be doing 70,000 doses a day, we'd be out of vaccine.
The most recent shipments have been ~120,000 vaccines/week for 2 weeks and then none for a third week. So if the tempo of Federal allotments is 120,000 a week, the 35,000 a day is not a bottleneck. They should of course be building capacity anyway, with the idea that deliveries will increase (and making a plan for what to do if/when the adenovirus vaccines are approved in the US; fortunately it looks like that can be "send it everywhere").
Anyway, wasting vaccines is obviously stupid, I'm not trying to argue about that.
Michigan (my state) is doing about 35,000 doses on weekdays at this point, which is frustratingly slow. But if they had spun up twice as fast, we wouldn't be doing 70,000 doses a day, we'd be out of vaccine.
The most recent shipments have been ~120,000 vaccines/week for 2 weeks and then none for a third week. So if the tempo of Federal allotments is 120,000 a week, the 35,000 a day is not a bottleneck. They should of course be building capacity anyway, with the idea that deliveries will increase (and making a plan for what to do if/when the adenovirus vaccines are approved in the US; fortunately it looks like that can be "send it everywhere").
Anyway, wasting vaccines is obviously stupid, I'm not trying to argue about that.