Shot in the dark

Election Day may have passed, but states are hurtling toward another big deadline on Nov. 15, when the Centers for Disease Control says they should be ready to receive the first doses of a coronavirus vaccine.

But in what feels like a repeat of March and April, when the Trump administration abandoned states to figure out their own response to the deadly coronavirus, federal health officials are once again giving states little funding and paltry guidance.

For one, the feds are requiring states be ready to receive a vaccine, despite the fact one hasn’t yet been approved from among multiple candidates in development, each of them with different requirements for storage and distribution.

States with limited cold storage capacity haven’t been informed how much vaccine they’ll get initially.

While the federal government and manufacturers cover costs of buying and shipping the vaccine, states left cashstrapped by the pandemic are on the hook to figure out how to keep those millions of doses in good condition.

The Trump administration shelled out just $200 million so far to help states create vaccine distribution plans, despite CDC Director Robert Redfield’s own estimate it will cost at least $6 billion. And federal officials aren’t funding efforts to train people to administer the vaccine, making an extremely optimistic assumption that America’s existing hospital and pharmacy workforce will be able to dispense millions of vaccine doses next year.

As vaccine enthusiast Benjamin Franklin once said, if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.