More questions than answers right now

San Diego County’s vaccine rollout plan, as much as I can tell from Tuesday’s front page cover story, is simply to distribute its meager 28,000 initial doses, appropriately, to frontline health care workers. And a reasonable, certainly debatable, pecking order has been established. The very complex logistics of dose distribution have been established. But that seems to be the extent of “the plan.” Things will certainly change between now and the next wave of doses. This step-at-a-time, wait-and-see approach, I think, foreshadows what should be expected over at least the next 10 months.

The scope of the vaccine rollout is massive and unprecedented, which means, in my view, don’t count on today’s plan to be the plan. As the unknowns begin to become known, we won’t really know, for example, what percentage of health care workers will voluntarily take the vaccine. Will they, at some point, be required to take it? What civil liberty issues might that create? How will anti-vaxxers respond to the rollout? Could this non-trivial cohort try to halt the rollout via the courts? Or might they and the equally non-trivial number of vaccine hesitant people fall in line as confidence (hopefully) increases? What is the marketing plan to combat hesitancy?

It’s nice that former presidents have raised their hands to publicly take the vaccine. We need much more than that. We need effort commensurate, no, greatly exceeding, the combined efforts of the polio vaccination campaign of the 1950s and the U.S.A. for Africa and Farm Aid benefits of 1985.