Another shot
On a frigid morning in January, Trudy Ronnel settled into her favorite sofa chair at the Westminster Place senior-living community in Evanston, Ill., pulled down the neckline on her red blouse and braced herself for a shot she’d anticipated for almost a year. At 92 years old, with multiple medical conditions, she spent most of 2020 fearful of contracting the COVID-19 plague that ravaged the world outside her first-floor window.
To protect herself, for the past few months she’d avoided Westminster’s communal rooms, which had provided a means to stay active and engaged but risked becoming a pathogenic petri dish.
Whenever she left her room, she dutifully wore a surgical face mask and maintained the mandated 6-ft. distance. The most difficult change came in the fall, when visits from her son, daughter and five grandchildren were cut off.
Living in relative isolation was not how Ronnel envisioned spending her golden years. Like millions of Americans, as soon as the first coronavirus vaccine was authorized, she began anxiously counting down to the day she’d receive her shot. As an elderly resident of a long-term-care facility, Ronnel is at higher risk of getting infected and experiencing serious symptoms, and thus belongs to one of the first priority groups to get vaccinated, along with health care workers. So, when a Walgreens pharmacist finally appeared in her doorway with the shot on Jan. 6, it came as a welcome sight. After getting the injection, Ronnel allowed herself to feel something that she hadn’t felt since the pandemic first began: the prospect of normality. “I hope this all begins to end soon,” she says.
That will depend. TIME spent the past year observing, traveling and speaking with dozens of people involved in the development, distribution and administration of the coronavirus vaccine. A month into the operation it has become clear that health experts, military logisticians and government authorities have often been at odds with one another over miscues, miscommunications and mistrust as they grappled with overcoming a tangle of logistical challenges in building an unprecedented health campaign from scratch.
According to local health officials, the Trump Administration’s decision to limit the federal government’s role in administering the vaccines left each state to create its own plans for locally distributing the shots and launching programs for getting them into people’s arms. That already-complicated logistical task, they say, was compounded by a lack of funds and a health care workforce already overwhelmed with COVID-19 testing, contact tracing and pandemic-control campaigns, not to mention mixed messages that left states in the dark about how many doses they could expect, and when.
In rolling out the vaccine, the U.S. in many ways repeated the same mistakes it made with COVID-19 testing last spring. Lack of federal leadership first in coordinating distribution of the tests, and later in supporting states to set up and
