Biden needs to set even more ambitious vaccination goals

We are far from the destination, but the return to normalcy has begun — and so have the normal games presidents play.

Donald Trump said many times that COVID-19 would just “disappear,” as if it were so much fake news ginned up to help Democrats. At one campaign stop, he railed, “COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID. ... On Nov. 4, you won’t hear about it anymore.”

Of course, he was wrong about the disease simply vanishing. More than 425,000 Americans have died of COVID19 — surpassing the number of U.S. soldiers who died in combat in both world wars and the Vietnam War combined. And just because the spin from the newly installed Joe Biden White House isn’t as reality-defying as what many of us became accustomed to over the last four years, “better than Trump” isn’t a standard worth bragging about.

Every new administration likes to reset political expectations. Staff members arrive at their new offices, look at the books and declare, “Dear Lord! It’s so much worse than we ever imagined.”

Normally, the calamity being discovered is economic. This time it’s the pandemic.

Jeff Zients, the newly installed White House coronavirus czar, told reporters, “What we’re inheriting from the Trump administration is so much worse than we could have imagined.”

To his credit, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, pushed back, albeit with mild understatement: “We’re certainly not starting from scratch, because there is activity going on in the distribution,” he said last week.

On Trump’s final day in office, some 1.5 million people were vaccinated. That was a high point. During Trump’s final week in office, the seven-day average was 912,000 per day.

In other words, Biden set the original bar too low. To reach the million-per-day target, we’d need only 88,000 additional vaccinations per day above the pre-Biden rate.

Thus, it was good news Monday, that Biden raised the target to 1.5 million vaccinations per day.

But he’s still playing catch-up with facts on the ground in order to keep expectations in check. We’re at 1.25 million vaccinations per day.

Perhaps Biden is scarred from the overpromising of the stimulus and shovel-ready jobs that ended up stinging the Obama administration.

Biden says he wants the federal government to respond to this crisis as if it were a war. Well, what kind of war? The modern kind, where a handful of people do almost everything while the rest of society and government are spectators? We haven’t fully mobilized the country for war since WWII, and if that’s the model, the Biden administration is falling short of the mark.

FDR put Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the man who built the Pentagon in 16 months, in charge of the Manhattan Project. Historian Paul Johnson tells the story of Groves calling the Treasury Department and demanding thousands of tons of silver for electrical wiring. The response from a vexed official: “In the Treasury we do not speak of tons of silver. Our unit is the troy ounce.”

Groves got his silver.

That’s the spirit people want from government right now. But last week, Biden said the federal government’s implementation of a vaccination program was “too rigid.”

Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, was asked on “Meet the Press” about the possibility of allowing states to cut out the middleman and purchase vaccines directly. “I don’t think that’s possible,” Klain replied, because the emergency-use authorization of the existing vaccines requires federal oversight.

That sounds rigid to me. Similarly, the United Kingdom has approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for emergency use, and the European Union could approve it this week. Under normal circumstances, I’d say the U.S. should wait for our Food and Drug Administration to finish scrutinizing the vaccine before adding it to our arsenal.

But these aren’t normal times. And we will never have a return to normalcy until the pandemic is behind us.