What’s Going Wrong With Vaccine Distribution

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Expand for us how it’s going in the United States particularly in Los Angeles County as we just said is having a really, really bad run of it right now.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, it is not going to really well here in the U.S. The U.S. is a very big place. And I think the thinking back in December from the federal government was, well, we’ll ship everything out to these states and these local — you know, these cities and they’ll take care of it, they’ll have their vaccination clinics. We’ll just get it on a plane, get it on a truck. And once we get the supplies to them, they’ll be fine. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way, and states and cities were telling the federal government it is not going to turn out that way. It is no easy feat to do vaccination clinics on this kind of a grand scale and it is not going to terribly well. There is a lot of chaos there is a lot of confusion and there’s also questions about the supply. So, do we give out all of the supply now and assume that when it comes time for people to get second doses that there will be enough? The federal government has essentially said, yes, there will be, but there is still some concerns whether that will be the case. There’s also some confusion who can get it. Can everybody get it? Just older people? Do you have to have an underlying condition? The rules may change from state to state. Right now, a lot of confusion, Christiane.

AMANPOUR: Elizabeth, you’re absolutely right. And here as well, here in the U.K. and elsewhere, vaccine rollouts just don’t seem to be going well. And it — there’s a sort of a sinking feeling in my stomach anyway because you remember at the beginning, all these leaders were talking about PPE and masks and, you know, getting test — trace and isolate under way, and that took forever and it never really came to bear in any meaningful way. And I’m wondering what the doctors who you talked to think might happen with this virus, with this disease if they even can’t get this end sort of game done to the vaccinations.

COHEN: So, Christiane, vaccination is important for two reasons. One, of course, to, you know, get immunity in the population, but the other is to stop the creation of variance. We’ve already seen a variant come out — first few reported in the U.K. We’ve seen variants reported in South Africa and in Brazil that in many ways look like they could be even worse than the ones in the U.K. The more this spread the more variants we will get. The more people who get this virus, the more the virus has the opportunity to get smart and to keep changing and changing, and then that decreases the chance that the vaccine will work as well as it has been. So, there’s a double reason that we really need to get this vaccine rollout done quickly all over the world. People need to be immune. And also, we need to tell the virus, stop mutating, and you can’t do that if the virus has all these opportunities to spread around and keep mutating.