On pro-Trump National Review, the yakking about the horrors of the Biden Administration is under way. Here’s Yuval Levin:
The Biden team has set as its goal getting 100 million Americans vaccinated in its first 100 days. That of course requires a pace of a million people getting vaccinated each day on average. And what pace were they left by the Trump administration?
There are various ways to track the pace, but they’re all relying on the same underlying state and federal data and so fall into the same general range every day. So let’s look at the Bloomberg vaccine tracker, which is probably the best organized of them. It shows that yesterday, the last day of the Trump administration, more than 1.5 million Americans were vaccinated. The numbers go up and down some each day, but the 7-day average for the last week of the Trump administration was 912,000 people vaccinated per day.
No. No No No. That’s not what the Bloomberg vaccine tracker shows.
Vaccinations in the U.S. began Dec. 14 with health-care workers, and so far 17.2 million shots have been given, according to a state-by-state tally by Bloomberg and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the last week, an average of 912,497 doses per day were administered.
A shot is not a vaccination! A vaccination requires two doses. The Bloomberg piece he cites is explicit:
The U.S. is managing state allocations of Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine, as well as Moderna’s shot and has said it will make more shots available in order to increase vaccinations. Both vaccines require two doses taken several weeks apart. At least 2.30 million people have completed the two-dose vaccination regimen.
Bold mine. 2.3 million fully vaccinated does not equate to a million people vaccinated a day. It’s been about a month since we started, so if we were on pace, it’d be 30 million fully vaccinated. But Bloomberg notes the 912,497 daily average figure for shots is the rolling week average.
And the subject is really even more convoluted than it sounds. As much as the Biden Admin is complaining about a lack of planning by Trump, it’s worth understanding that it’s relatively easy to vaccinate in big cities, where a long trip may be a few miles on city streets.
It’s a whole ‘nuther ball of wax out in the rural areas, where getting to a clinic may take quite a trip – a trip not appropriate for elderly patients. But Levin can’t be bothered to explore this aspect.
It’s really inexcusable for Levin to pretend that a shot equates a vaccination. Which shot completes a vaccination and which initiates a vaccination may be difficult to quantify for statistical purposes, but suffice it to say that at this point in the cycle, as shown by Bloomberg’s data, most are initiators.
So Levin’s attack on the Biden Administration is mostly dishonest – or, like Trump, incompetent.
