It would be pretty hard to argue that the COVID-19 vaccine rollout has been flawless.
This isn't just a failing of healthcare administration. Or supply chain. Or government. Or cybersecurity.
Everything fell apart at once. Maybe because it was never all that put-together in the first place.
Let's look at some news about the ongoing cascade of failures and some advice about what we can do - in all our various departments - to stem the flow of mistakes and misinformation.
- At the same time that NYC is running out of vaccine doses, LA has excess that's being misappropriated by unscrupulous physicians.
- Since vaccine distribution has been left to states without any central coordination, basically every state is failing. The few good-ish examples exist have one thing in common: they have relatively small, manageable populations.
- That's something that they have in common with the country distributing vaccines the best: Israel has done a comparatively incredible job of vaccinating its population. How?
- Simply put, the successes being experienced right now - whether they're on an international or hyperlocal level - are happening where people are learning lessons from the disruption of the last year.
- Healthcare in America might be "too vital to fail," but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't try to improve.
Amid all the bad news of problems out of your control, the good news is that one thing you can directly control is the amount of medical product waste going into hospital dumpsters. And the high cost associated with it - that can be lowered, too.