“Biden has made ending the pandemic a centerpiece of his early presidency, vowing an all-out federal effort to turn the tide of the crisis within the next several months.
But even as he signed a flurry of directives laying the foundation for that response, White House officials have sought to tamp down expectations — blaming the Trump administration for leaving behind a situation that they insisted was far worse than expected, despite months of transition meetings and planning.
“What we’re inheriting from the Trump administration is so much worse than we could have imagined,” Jeff Zients, Biden’s Covid-19 coordinator, told reporters Wednesday night. “We don’t have the visibility that we would hope to have into supply and allocations.”
Biden officials complained during the transition that their efforts to gather information on the coronavirus response were stymied at times by Trump administration political appointees. Biden aides for weeks were unable to access Tiberius, the central government database used to monitor vaccine distributions, according to one transition official. They were also denied access to certain standing meetings related to the government’s response until a few days before Biden was sworn in.
Yet while few disputed the transition was rocky, officials working on the transition or familiar with its work said it was patently obvious that the Trump administration response was severely lacking, and it should have been no surprise to Biden’s team.
That is particularly the case with the vaccine pipeline, which has been at the center of weeks of finger-pointing between states and the federal government over the slow pace of vaccinations.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/21/biden-covid-vaccine-plan-461237