As recently as the week before Christmas, Trump regime officials and members of Operation Warp Speed and the coronavirus task force said we would vaccinate at least 20 million people by the end of 2020, but it became clear that would not happen when states began to report they would not receive as many doses as they were promised.
Vaccinating 20 million people would require 40 million doses of two-dose vaccines but, on the last day of December, the United States had only distributed about 14 million doses and administered even fewer of them.
From Reuters:
(Reuters) - Only about 2.8 million Americans had received a COVID-19 vaccine going into the last day of December, putting the United States far short of the government's target to vaccinate 20 million people this month. [...]
About 14 million doses of Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccines have been distributed to states so far, federal officials told reporters on Wednesday, shy of its goal to ship 20 million doses this month.
As late as early December, officials maintained they would have 40 million doses available this month, enough to vaccinate 20 million Americans with a two-dose regimen.
The second dose of the vaccine is suppose to be administered a month after the initial dose so, technically speaking, the 2.8 million people injected as of Friday are not fully inoculated. Half of the vaccine is only 52 percent effective according to Pfizer's trials.
In any case, others have pointed out that at our current pace, it would take much longer than anticipated to vaccinate enough of the country to achieve some form of herd immunity. Only about 1.3 percent of the country has received an initial dose at this point according to Bloomberg's current count. That's after three weeks, meaning it would take more than a year to vaccinate 70 percent of the country at the current rate.
It is evident and justifiable to say that Trump's "Operation Warp Speed" was a massive failure because quickly distributing and administering a vaccine was the whole point of the program. The operation was suppose to fund development and speed delivery, but the first vaccine to be approved was developed by Pfizer which did not participate in the program. Delivery has also fallen far short of where it was suppose to be.
The idea that I would personally receive a vaccine by next summer is almost starting to feel fantastical, but the Biden administration may be able to turn things around. We'll see.