Amazon Offers Biden Help With Covid-19 Vaccine Distribution (nbcnews.com) 245
Amazon has extended an offer to President Joe Biden to assist with the national distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, a move that could expedite the federal effort to combat the pandemic. From a report: Dave Clark, the CEO of Amazon's consumer business, and one of the company's highest-ranking executives, sent a letter to the president shortly after he was sworn in Wednesday. "As you begin your work leading the country out of the COVID-19 crisis, Amazon stands ready to assist you in reaching your goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of your administration," he wrote in his letter, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News.
"We are prepared to leverage our operations, IT, & communications capabilities and expertise to assist your administration's vaccination efforts," Clark wrote. "Our scale allows us to make a meaningful impact immediately in the fight against COVID-19, and we stand ready to assist you in this effort." Clark said Amazon had agreements in place with licensed third-party health care providers to administer vaccines on-site at Amazon facilities. "We are prepared to move quickly once vaccines are available," he wrote.
"We are prepared to leverage our operations, IT, & communications capabilities and expertise to assist your administration's vaccination efforts," Clark wrote. "Our scale allows us to make a meaningful impact immediately in the fight against COVID-19, and we stand ready to assist you in this effort." Clark said Amazon had agreements in place with licensed third-party health care providers to administer vaccines on-site at Amazon facilities. "We are prepared to move quickly once vaccines are available," he wrote.
God, I hate politics (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:God, I hate politics (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the known low opinionof Trump about Amazon and Bezos, it is quite certain that any such offer during Trump's tenure would look like an attempt to curry favor (and would, most certainly, be rebuked or wasted, given the track record of outgoing administration). So, I don't see this as "politics" - only as a rational response.
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Given the known low opinionof Trump about Amazon and Bezos, it is quite certain that any such offer during Trump's tenure would look like an attempt to curry favor (and would, most certainly, be rebuked or wasted, given the track record of outgoing administration). So, I don't see this as "politics" - only as a rational response.
And those that still feel justified about a "rational" response of putting politics over health and safety, deserve any negative attacks against that selfish decision.
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Such an offer may have been extended privately, and Amazon may not have tried to publicize it because they knew that would invite Trump into a very public and frustrating conversation.
Here they can publicly try to look good without much fear of negative publicity from an antagonistic president. Which is also kind of risky as a PR move, trying to look heroic before they necessarily do anything yet.
However, I do agree the optics are bad, it at least *appears* that Amazon wouldn't work with Trump even for the
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Well, how about you inform us about the distribution plan of the former alleged president.
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According to CNN it doesn't exist.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/0... [cnn.com]
A few other sources have picked this story up, try google. If they did exist you have to wonder why they were kept secret, some some kind of surprise gift to the Biden administration. I mean if you had a great plan to save the nation wouldn't you be telling everyone, and asking them to implement it?
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Re:God, I hate politics (Score:5, Interesting)
Think of it a bit like a "government version" of Asimov's First Law of Robotics [wikipedia.org].
There is actually a federal statute, Malfeasance In Office [wikipedia.org], which can be used to censure a public employee [which would therefore extend up to and including the President] for what amounts to negligence in office. In particular, think about that potential for malfeasance "crossed with" the part of Asimov's "First Law" that covers the prohibition that a robot must not, "through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm".
Contrived examples are almost always either unhelpful or dangerous... but that hasn't stopped me before... so how about this: if you had a security guard or a fire warden who had specific obligations to protect public property from theft, damage or fire... and if that guard fell asleep on their job and through that allowed public property to be stolen or destroyed, you [as a member of the community paying for that employee through your taxes] to ask for that employee to be sanctioned [up to and including termination of employment].
In the case of the specific obligations of the post of President of the United States, the Constitution covers the scope but it necessarily avoids laundry-list levels of detail. [Had it been too specific, it would have required constant revision]. But it should be possible to draft a more actionable "job description" - i.e. something that comes up for review every few years - with a series of measurable performance objectives.
Somewhere in there, the people who pay for the President [the tax-payers] need to be able to have confidence that "the basics" are getting done. Maybe putting a bit more thought in to the way that we make sure this happens would also help to ensure that a President acts for the whole nation, not just the party or people who voted for them...
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The link you pointed to does not say there is a federal statute about malfeasance in office. And, in fact, there is no federal offense along those lines. The closest would be some variation of "honest services fraud", but the Supreme Court clarified in 2010 that "honest services fraud" is quite a bit beyond incompetence or simple unethical behavior.
Malfeasance in office is mentioned [cornell.edu] in the US Code, in that a grand jury may issue a report about malfeasance "by an appointed public officer or employee as the
Re:God, I hate politics (Score:4, Insightful)
It's particularly timely on the day that it emerged that Trump had no plan for distributing the vaccine and the Biden administration has had to start from scratch with it.
Uh, how did they distribute so many vaccines already without a plan? Already I know more people personally who've gotten the vaccine than who have gotten COVID.
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My premise is I did some research (aka simple internet search), found out that Trump had a plan since at least September, and that they largely followed the plan, which is why people got vaccinated within a few days of the vaccine being approved.
There were so many things wrong with the Trump administration, why do you have to make things up to criticize him for?
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Re:God, I hate politics (Score:5, Funny)
So, even after President Trump has left office, you're going to continue to lie about him?
Which is especially unfair because Trump has proven himself to be such a wellspring of truth and honesty.
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Two wrongs don't make a right. Do you think you have moral license to behave no better than Trump?
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Two wrongs don't make a right. Do you think you have moral license to behave no better than Trump?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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So you DO think you have a moral license to behave as badly as Trump. A simple "yes" would have been a much shorter and clearer response.
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And were you so bravely critical of the collusion hoax, which helped to normalize the environment of lying?
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The morality of an action (or the importance of being moral, if you prefer) is proportional to the severity and consequences of the moral transgression, you absolute dumbfuck Trump-stan.
It's plainly obvious to anyone except for a Trump-stan that he didn't lend any credence to your assertion that he was lying (this news really did come out) which is why he made a sarcastic joke. But even if he *was* deliberately lying, your attempt to make it seem like his lies and Trumps lies are equivalent could only come
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The Mueller report says: "The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA's interference operation." And: "The investigation did not establish any agreement among Campaign officials -- or between such officials and Russia-linked individuals -- to interfere with or obstruct a lawful function of a government agency during the campaign or transition period."
Yes, you are complicit in perpetrating the collusion hoax. Like Google, you have de
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Where's the lie? Show your work.
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The Trump administration had no national distribution plan. Vaccines have been sent directly to the states.
That isn't a lie, it's just yet more incompetence.
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The only one lying was the con artist. It's why his QAnon conspirators are having a meltdown [bbc.com] he didn't declare martial law to stay in power.
As for your nonsense, yes, the con artist had no plan [cnn.com] for how to roll out vaccines. Biden now has to start from scratch and develop some kind of coherent plan to get vaccines out to everyone while almost 4,000 a day are dying from covid because of the con artist's delib
Re: God, I hate politics (Score:3)
Turnabout's fair play.
I donâ(TM)t care if the other kid is sitting in the corner eating glue, that's not a good reason for you to start huffing paint. Act like an adult.
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Vote them all out.
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So they intentionally waited until Biden was inaugurated to extend this offer. This is why I hate politics so much. They could have been helping the whole time, but they wanted to hold off for political points. Pretty shameful in my opinion.
I thought the same thing.
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Who is to say they tried with Trump and Trump was not receptive.
If they had it would have been front page news
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Why would you suppose that? There are a lot of things that do not make front page news.
With regards the the previous administration, the rule was to always make negative stories front page news.
Positive stories were not to be reported. Even objective headlines were cause for outrage, like this one:
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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False. Bezos has been trying to work with the White House since at least March 2020:
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03... [techcrunch.com]
So since there's a new team, Amazon has to reach out again. Because the Trump administration certainly was screwing up vaccine distribution as anyone who isn't an idiot or liar will agree:
https://www.vanityfair.com/new... [vanityfair.com]
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False. Bezos has been trying to work with the White House since at least March 2020:
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03... [techcrunch.com]
So since there's a new team, Amazon has to reach out again. Because the Trump administration certainly was screwing up vaccine distribution as anyone who isn't an idiot or liar will agree:
https://www.vanityfair.com/new... [vanityfair.com]
Care to explain what the fuck Amazon was going to offer in March of 2020? Because it sure as shit wasn't vaccine distribution.
It's one thing to call out the facts here, but don't make it sound like Amazon was really being helpful a year ago. They were about as clueless as the next bookseller dangerously pretending to be in medicine.
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Care to explain what the fuck Amazon was going to offer in March of 2020? Because it sure as shit wasn't vaccine distribution.
It was obvious in March 2020 that there would be some sort of vaccine to distribute in the near future.
Competent administrations prepare for obvious future events, instead of waiting for a vaccine to arrive and then try to figure out a distribution plan.
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It was obvious in March 2020 that there would be some sort of vaccine to distribute in the near future.
Competent administrations prepare for obvious future events, instead of waiting for a vaccine to arrive and then try to figure out a distribution plan.
Re:God, I hate politics (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure that it is really needed, either. Checking the statistics today, over 30 million doses have already been distributed to the states, but less than half have actually been administered.
That would indicate that either the existing distribution is adequate to maintain an over-supply, or the people who are managing the distribution at the state level aren't doing all they can with the resources already provided.
Management (Score:5, Informative)
The states with the highest levels of vaccinations are the Dakotas and West Virginia. Their secret sauce is, apparently:
1. Very few restrictions on whom gets vaccinated - they send the doses to hospitals, nursing homes and pharmacies and let them prioritize
2. Leveraging the National Guard to for shipments
3. Not relying on one or two large pharmacy chains for distribution (the US government has deals with Walgreens and CVS) but using more local chains and large independent pharmacies
The states with the worst rates are New York and California who, incidentally, have the most complex rules on vaccine distribution.
Re:Management (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I understand of New York, their main problem was that they weren't allowed to use up doses opportunistically. So if everyone that had been scheduled to be vaccinated that day was done, and they had 100 doses left, for a while, they weren't able to vaccinate 100 people in the hospital that weren't on the list without jumping through a lot of hoops, which eventually meant that 100 doses were wasted, because they can't be re-stored. It's gross malpractice, and that's squarely at the feet of Cuomo.
Trump was not serious about COVID, and had no plan.
Cuomo is very serious about COVID, and makes terrible plans. Turns out both are bad.
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The crux of the problem in the United States' handling of the entire COVID crisis is that individual states are doing so much of the management rather than it being entirely controlled by the federal government.
In my opinion, that is absolutely insane. If a foreign power invaded the United States it wouldn't be up to each of the fifty states to try and defend themselves. The federal government and the military should have been orchestrating the US response the minute this was declared a pandemic. The US mil
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The federal government has the capacity to handle logistics like this, it has just chosen not to under Trump's incompetence.
The federal government is *not* equipped to handle something like this.
Think about it as a management and information problem. You have to distribute hundreds of millions of vaccines all over the country. Some are going to huge cities. Some are going to small cities. Some are going out in the middle of nowhere. There are reliable supply chains in some areas but not others. There are reliable shipping routes in some areas but not others. The federal government does not have all of this information, but the s
Re:Management (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I understand of New York, their main problem was that they weren't allowed to use up doses opportunistically. So if everyone that had been scheduled to be vaccinated that day was done, and they had 100 doses left, for a while, they weren't able to vaccinate 100 people in the hospital that weren't on the list without jumping through a lot of hoops, which eventually meant that 100 doses were wasted, because they can't be re-stored. It's gross malpractice, and that's squarely at the feet of Cuomo.
Yep. Here in the South, my wife works in a nursing home. They got their first batch on 12/31, but had more doses than people willing to take the vaccine. So they asked her if I wanted to get it. Once I made sure there was no one else wanting the dose and it would get destroyed I ran over there. To me, it would have been irresponsible not to have gotten one in that case, because that means down the line someone else will be getting the vaccine sooner than they otherwise would.
For the record, I got Moderna. Felt like someone took a baseball bat to my arm, sore and stiff (to the point where I couldn't fully raise it) for about 3 days. Much worse than the flu shot, but no other side effects. I should get round 2 a week from today, which I hear can be worse for side effects.
Sad thing is, they are now currently in an outbreak where roughly half their staff and residents have tested positive(including my wife, who was down for several days and is just now getting back her sense of smell but still has fatigue), with multiple deaths. I wish more of their residents had been willing to get the shot so there wouldn't have been one for me.
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Not sure that it is really needed, either. Checking the statistics today, over 30 million doses have already been distributed to the states, but less than half have actually been administered.
That would indicate that either the existing distribution is adequate to maintain an over-supply, or the people who are managing the distribution at the state level aren't doing all they can with the resources already provided.
Of course they haven't. Most county health departments have never dealt with anything like this before and have no idea how to handle the logistics. Handing it out to the states without any federal resources or oversight predictably resulted in chaos.
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Re:God, I hate politics (Score:4, Informative)
Checking the statistics today, over 30 million doses have already been distributed to the states, but less than half have actually been administered.
Up until a few days ago, the policy in place was that states should hold a second dose in reserve for anyone who received their first dose, so aren't the numbers you describe pretty much exactly what we'd expect to see right now if the states have administered all of the doses they were cleared to administer? After all, vaccination efforts are still ramping up after just beginning a few weeks ago, so most of the people who have received their first doses are still in the period between doses, which would suggest that those doses shouldn't have been administered yet.
That said, the policy was updated about a week ago (January 12th) by the outgoing administration, with the new policy instructing states to administer those reserves as first doses, rather than holding them back. The new idea is that as those reserved doses are used by new patients, additional doses in the federal reserve will be released to the states sooner than they would have been otherwise. Assuming it goes well it should result in a faster rollout (to be fair, the US is currently 5th in the world in terms of COVID vaccinations per capita, so it isn't doing too bad, though better is always welcome), but policy changes like these can take weeks before they really start to make a noticeable difference—it's been 7 business days since the policy change was announced, but it takes at least a few days for states to put together a plan in response to federal policy changes, a few more days to inform recipients that doses are available, a few more days to get them in, etc.—so it's still a bit early for the statistics to show an inflection point in response to the revised policy.
Check back again next week or the week after. If the number of doses being held back don't look drastically different by then, that's when we start to make noise.
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Your argument is superficial. You yourself admit that the elderly skew Republican, and that is precisely the top demographic in nearly all states for vaccination. The rest of your bullet points rely on some xenophobic stereotype that all Republicans are white people that lives in the sticks. You're just upset that that high risk and high population density communities are being prioritized over you.
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I'm sorry but am I reading this right? People of certain age group, who tend to vote for Republican are more at risk of death? Why?
COVID-19 death rates - estimated at about 3% overall, go up with age. Kids in their first decade pretty much don't die of it. It's single-digit percentages by late middle age, hitting double-digits around retirement age and getting up into the 20%s for the elderly.
Young people tend to hold leftish opinions and are likely to vote Democrat, old people to hold more conservative op
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Except theres no evidence they hadn't already offered the services and got told no, expecially with trumps antipathy towards Amazon. They may well be announcing it now because with a new president they might actually get a look in.
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The Trump administration had no national distribution plan. Vaccines were being sent directly to the states. Extending the offer to the Trump administration would be as effective as extending the offer to you personally.
When you have nothing to distribute, you have no reason to be approached by a distributor.
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It turns out that Trump's team had no plan for vaccine distribution. This is why the "Operation Warp Speed" stonewalled during the transition.
Biden's team is pretty much having to start from square one.
This is why Amazon's offer is timed the way it is.
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So they intentionally waited until Biden was inaugurated to extend this offer.
Considering the distribution problems with a vaccine have been apparent for less than 2 weeks, and the last 2 weeks have been nothing other than a shit show from an outgoing leader causing an issurrecting, hiding sulking in a corner while his entire department is fired, and concerned seemingly only with throwing out a list of pardons and approving drilling in natural reserves, WHY WOULDN'T YOU WAIT? To do anything with the government last week would have been profoundly stupid.
This isn't politics. This is b
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So you are part of Amazon for you to know this insider information that Amazon sat on this until now? I can think of many reasons:
Still a future offer (Score:2)
The offer didn't say "we'll do this right away", they said "we'll do this when vaccines are available". I'm not sure what use reaching out to Trump offering to help in March would have been.
I suppose if Trump had agreed to buy the Piezer vaccine when it was offered, we may have enough doses now that it would matter.
How strange that a company would reach out to the person who could make the buying decision as opposed to their predecessor.
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Yay (Score:3)
Can't wait for that AmazonBasics Covid Vaccination :)
(but no, seriously, if they have one I'll take it . . . )
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out of market bill
Vaccination $20
Doctor on site $200
But your up front bill is just
Copay $30
but... (Score:2)
The vaccine might be free but you have to sign up for Amazon-Prime, Amazon-Healthcare, Wholefoods Delivery and a whole load more in order to get it.
Amazon never does anything out of the goodness of their heart.
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Amazon Inoculation Day? Oh yes, the day we get AIDS (Amazon Inoculation Day by Syringe)
I wouldn't take it. (Score:3)
(but no, seriously, if they have one I'll take it . . . )
I wouldn't.
I've worked in a company providing monitoring equipment for handling medical supplies that require refrigeration or they degrade. "Cold-chain" handling is a VERY hard job - the exact opposite of the quality/price tradeoff scale from Amazon's operations.
The two approved vaccines both require continuous refrigeration, one to cryogenic temperatures, or they degrade. Then they fail to work (AND MAY provoke dangerous reactions). (Some of thos
Re: I wouldn't take it. (Score:2)
Yes. *That* something I'd like to see lowest-pay worker slaves handle.... /s
Prepare for half the vaccinated people not being actually vaccinated because the cooling chain was half-assed by overtired workers, . .
and you do not know which half,
calling in question the efficacy of the vaccine, which will take months to clear . .
Only to be distributed by Amazon again . .
And after a few *years* of denying and lawsuits and half-assed superfici appeasements, it will be halfway fixed but not really.
With Amazon makin
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Golly, if only they'd put some sort of indicator inside the boxes that would tell them if the vaccines got above safe temperature. Heck, they could stick it to the vials themselves.
Oh wait, that's exactly what they do.
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Can't wait for that AmazonBasics Covid Vaccination :)
(but no, seriously, if they have one I'll take it . . . )
It will no doubt be the Chinese vaccine with its 50% efficacy and and priced at a discount. It'll also need to be shipped back twice because UPS dropped kicked the box marked fragile through your bedroom window and after you take it it'll turn out it was mixed with lead paint and recalled.
So at least you'll get a product 100% consistent with the expectations for AmazonBasics
Wow, how generous (Score:2, Funny)
Amazon's going to help Biden distribute Trump's vaccine? The one that everyone said wouldn't exist until 2022 at the earliest?
How generous and definitely not politically motivated of them.
Re:Wow, how generous (Score:4, Funny)
Amazon is already distributing "Trump's vaccine" (aka Clorox).
Re:Wow, how generous (Score:5, Informative)
I'm curious. When you say "Trump's vaccine" which one are you referring to?
Is it the Pfizer one developed by Bointech in Germany that had nothing to do with Trump?
Or maybe you mean the Moderna one that was designed back in January 23, 2020 before US cases even existed?
I'm perfectly fine with giving credit to helping accelerate the testing, but calling it a "Trump vaccine" is ludicrous.
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> I'm perfectly fine with giving credit to helping accelerate the testing, but calling it a "Trump vaccine" is ludicrous.
They meant Trump virus.
Re:Wow, how generous (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the one that President Trump got through by pushing the useless FDA bureaucrats out of the way.
Any president would have done the same thing, on the advice of his advisors. Trump doesn't get any credit for doing the obvious thing, although we can be happy that he didn't do the Trump thing and fuck it up somehow. Wait, no we can't; the vaccine was created in a timely fashion, but he fucked up the ordering so there's no second doses, which means the vaccine is going to be half-assed for most people unless Biden pulls a total hail mary. Trump in fact did fuck it all up.
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Yet it still took longer to get approved than the UK... Trump would do/say anything if there was a chance that he'd get his name at the top of the bill on Fox News.
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Those bureaucrats that were leaned upon to parrot wonderful news about how the alleged administration was winning the Covid war?
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Could you point to specifically what policy Trump changed at the FDA?
Because it looks like they followed the standard Emergency Use Authorization protocol that's been around for decades.
Re: Wow, how generous (Score:2)
Yes, Trump is a football player, and the FDA are quarterbacks or whatever, and he physically pushed them to the side with his tiny tiny hands... riiight.
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The one that everyone said wouldn't exist until 2022 at the earliest?
By everyone you mean "no one" right? You know people like Fauci has been saying for 8 months already the development of a vaccine will concluded by the year end (which it was)
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Amazon's going to help Biden distribute Trump's vaccine? The one that everyone said wouldn't exist until 2022 at the earliest?
How generous and definitely not politically motivated of them.
Trump's vaccine? The credit for that vaccine goes to the 'scientists' and 'experts' that Trump and his supporters have been waging a war against for years.
Science, schmience! They said this was a MIRACLE!
Re:Wow, how generous (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wow, how generous (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, Trump did nothing and helped nobody. The vaccine would've been created without his 'Operation Warp Speed'; Moderna had a vaccine candidate TWO DAYS after the genome was sequenced, on January 11th, 2020.
The experts were hedging their bets; the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are the first of their kind. We've never been able to make a vaccine this quickly before; literally all the time was taken up safety and efficacy testing, rather than spending any time really developing it. TWO DAYS.
Trump didn't even admit the disease was a problem until the summer, so he gets ZERO credit for this. None, zip, nada. The scientists at Moderna and BioNTech did everything on their own. Pfizer/BioNTech specifically did not take any of the money from Operation Warp Speed as to remain politically neutral in this.
This isn't even an Al Gore-esque kind of situation; he actually did a thing that eventually had an effect on the development of the Internet. Trump did nothing but make conditions so bad that we're in desperate need of a vaccine. If the USA had done as good a job as New Zealand at controlling the spread, we wouldn't even be in this bind.
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Sigh, Moderna's vaccine candidate was ready on the 13th, the sequencing was available on the 11th, to be clear.
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I certainly remember the experts saying it was almost certain a vaccine would be *approved* by the end of the year. They did predict getting it distributed to everybody would be in 2021 and maybe even longer.
Guess what: that is EXACTLY what happened.
Trump predicted the vaccine would be approved before election day, and yes everybody said that was not going to happen, though the thought it would be approved during his current term. Guess what: that is EXACTLY what happened.
Would love to see an actual undocto
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And Warp Speed's only job was to funnel money to the drug companies who would be doing the research and production:
White House Meeting: Gee, Mr Alleged President, what are we going to do about the Covid virus?
Mr.AP: Nothing, it will magically disappear.
WHM: Errr, just in case it doesn't, we don't know what to do.
Mr.AP: Why are you asking me?
Bright Spark at the Back of the Room: I know, I know, let's give the drug companies money to develop a vaccine.
Mr.AP: Damn, I like my Brand Spanking New Idea.
Re: Wow, how generous (Score:2)
You're saying they got no autonomois thinking capabilities of their own?
You might just be right!
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Which is why he created Operation Warp Speed
Moderna's vaccine was developed before Operation Warp Speed existed. The only thing Operation Warp Speed could do is help fund safety and efficacy tests, which aren't that hard or expensive.
Pfizer's vaccine was developed in Germany, and received no help from Operation Warp Speed.
Most of Operation Warp Speeds money was spent on vaccines that have not yet started stage 3 trials, and probably won't given the two ultra-cold that are already approved, and the one "regular" vaccine from Johnson and Johnson that
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Donald J Trump took responsibility for getting things done
You are full of shit.
Donald J Trump has never taken responsibility for a single thing in his entire damned life.
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Actually, I think he's taken responsibility for even the things he didn't do. Or maybe I should say taken credit.
Cold chain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Both currently approved vaccines require being kept frozen - one to cryogenic temperatures - continuously until shortly before use, or they degrade and fail to work. Handling them properly, and insuring they WERE kept properly cold the entire time (and the packages were not damaged so that the internal insulation is intact, allowing them to survive the rated time as they're being moved from one cooler to another), and MEASURING this so defective product won't be used, requires substantial medical-grade infrastructure - called "cold chain" in the trade.
Is Amazon up to it?
Our household, sequestered since March 10th, has been supplied by deliveries, largely by Amazon. The fraction of canned-food articles that have arrived bashed-in gives me little hope that their infrastructure's current processes, standards, and workforce training (heavily optimized for low overall cost and minimal worker handling time per package) can be leveraged for medical-grade vaccine distribution.
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Came here to say pretty much that. I imagine they could handle some, but their reefer trucks (whatever ones they have) are highly unlikely to be equipped to handle that level of cold...
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I imagine they could handle some, but their reefer trucks (whatever ones they have) are highly unlikely to be equipped to handle that level of cold...
Once we have one that only requires ordinary freezing they MIGHT still be able to manage it with the infrastructure they acquired when they bought Whole Foods.
But I wouldn't trust it unless they hospitals picked it up at the stores. Whole Foods delivery was added after the acquisition and I'm not impressed with their handling.
Once we have a vaccine that can b
No need to deliver to the home (Score:2)
From the article
"Clark said Amazon had agreements in place with licensed third-party health care providers to administer vaccines on-site at Amazon facilities."
I agree that delivering to the home is not likely to work, however, delivering large batches of the vaccine to Amazon facilities should work. It will require a lot fewer specialized trucks and cryogenic storage units.
Re: (Score:3)
Both currently approved vaccines require being kept frozen - one to cryogenic temperatures - continuously until shortly before use, or they degrade and fail to work. Handling them properly, and insuring they WERE kept properly cold the entire time (and the packages were not damaged so that the internal insulation is intact, allowing them to survive the rated time as they're being moved from one cooler to another), and MEASURING this so defective product won't be used, requires substantial medical-grade infrastructure - called "cold chain" in the trade.
Is Amazon up to it?
Door to door? Probably not. Leveraging their shipping network-both air and ground- as a middle man to get vaccines from production facilities to distribution centers? Absolutely.
I used to work in air cargo, at one point working in my facility's temperature control area. Besides fresh flowers, fish, vegetables, etc, we would regularly get shipments of pharmaceuticals head ed to/coming from overseas. They came in things like this:
https://www.envirotainer.com/p... [envirotainer.com]
Fully sealed, run off batteries, can fit in
One condition (Score:5, Funny)
The US Government is going to have to become a Prime subscriber.
This is not what they do. (Score:2)
Regulations around refrigerated drugs are extremely strict so that you don't die from taking them. This includes constant real-time monitoring with custom software/hardware for auditing the entire process from production to delivery.
Amazon handling these vaccines with the infrastructure they have to meet those standards is absolutely laughable.
Source: My wife works in refrigerated drugs for a major pharma company. I am a Prime subscriber and have seen some absolutely beat to shit packages ;P
Of course very very well paid. (Score:2)
As if Bezos gave two shits about the health of any of the peasants...
Re:BS (Score:5, Informative)
They tried, but the effin fuckbag in the big chair wouldn't work with Amazon. But make sure to blame the wrong people, like your type always does.
(briefly inspects your comment history) ...like you always do. Looks like it's kind of a thing for you.
Re: (Score:2)
Trump had a compulsion to divide the world into people on his side and people against him with a pettiness as deep as a 7th grader.
Re: (Score:2)
effin pricks wouldn't work with the prior admin to better the country. BS. Hope they get covid and die.
Oh fuck off. Amazon has been providing logistics and services to the Whitehouse since back in March. Bezos met regularly with Trump directly on this topic. In April Amazon was providing logistic services for PPE and assisting in the development of ventilators. They offered their logistics services for vaccines on multiple occasions last year anticipating problems.
Do us a favour, go to one of your #maga rallies, lick all the hand rails, and then refuse to wear a ventilator for your freedoms and spare us with
Pharmacy can't be members only! (Score:2)
Pharmacy can't be members only!
Re: (Score:2)
The issue is not getting the shots to the places, the states have plenty of them in the storage.
Are you unable to feel the cognitive dissonance in this sentence?
Getting the shots out of storage and "to the places" is precisely the problem.