How has President Joe Biden and his promised super-competent COVID-19 team doing after it’s first two weeks on the job?
Well, sadly, the new boss’s performance is largely indistinguishable from the old boss’s performance.
Why the slow start? A Biden vaccine insider put it succinctly. He quoted Nevada’s wise philosopher Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
“After a week on the job,” Politico reported, “Biden’s team is still trying to locate upwards of 20 million vaccine doses that have been sent to states.”
It’s hard to speed up vaccinations from the federal level when you can’t put your finger on where the vaccine doses are at the state level. Even California, which Nevada loves to emulate, admitted last week that it hasn’t worked to allow counties and health systems to take charge of coronavirus vaccine delivery. Gov. Gavin Newsom admits that he still can’t answer the key question: Where are California’s unused doses?
Hope Team Biden finds its footing soon, because the first two weeks in the ring have not been pretty.
COVID DEATH ACCURACY
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the very low number of COVID-19 deaths in rural Nevada. In that process, I’m afraid, I may have led people into thinking that I am a virus denier of some sort. I am not anything of the sort.
COVID-19 is real. But I wonder how many of the reported virus deaths are actually the primary cause of death. The chief medical officer in a California county where we also have a Battle Born newspaper, told me straight up that anytime a person dies with COVID-19, the cause of death will always be listed as COVID-19, even if the person actually died of, say, a heart attack, or kidney failure, etc.
There is no attempt, he told me, to distinguish and report the actual primary cause of death. We’re going to need to clean up this comorbidity issue going forward. Accurate numbers do matter.
ONE MORE THING
— Attention my Nevada liberal friends: Don’t be so open minded that your brain falls out.
— At all my fave breakfast joints, bacon is an essential oil.
— When you think about the vastness of interstellar space and the tiny spec that is Earth, it’s pretty easy to rationalize eating a whole pie.
— When I finish eating, I have to show my empty hands to the dog like a blackjack dealer.
— Glockamole!
Sorry for that last one. I’ll pick up my knitting and let myself out. Until we meet again, be safe, be kind and mask-up. Subscribe to your local newspaper. It’s important.
(Sherman R. Frederick is the founder of Battle Born Media, a newspaper company dedicated to the preservation of community newspapers. You can follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/sherm.frederick/. He may be reached at shermfrederick@gmail.com.)
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