The logistics alone are daunting. We might not reach true normal until a sizable majority of the country is vaccinated, and our traditional method for fighting infectious disease — require vaccination to attend primary school — won’t achieve that. How do we purchase, store and distribute all those doses? How do we keep track of who has been vaccinated, particularly if vaccination requires multiple doses? All this needs to be resolved at the federal level, as much as possible, because in a country as open and mobile as the United States, we’re all only as well as our sickest fellow state.
Such a response cannot be mounted on the fly. We need to be building the capacity right now, even if that means that we staff up agencies and buildings that sit idle for a year as we wait for the right vaccine candidate.
But the logistical problems seem almost trivial compared to the political problems. The covid-19 response has become almost hopelessly politicized, even over small precautions such as masks. Resistance is likely to become stiffer still when authorities want to inject something into someone’s body. Especially since that resistance will tap into preexisting reserves of anti-vaccination fervor that were already overflowing on both the right and the left.
From the article: