Kicking ass and taking names

It's the only way to get things done in a large organization

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I got my second shot of the Pfizer vaccine this morning.  Apparently, the people at Stonybrook hospital figured out how to do it over the last three weeks, because it went a lot faster than the first shot. 

I am very, very grateful to the doctors and scientists at places like Vanderbilt Medical Center where they helped to develop the vaccine, and I’m grateful to the drug companies like Pfizer for getting their act together to produce enough of it that nearly 100 million of us have been vaccinated by now.  And I’m grateful to everyone who stood in line with me this morning.  All of them were wearing their masks, and all of them had made the decision to act responsibly not only in their own interest but in the interest of all of us by getting vaccinated. 

The day before Joe Biden took office, we had lost 400,000 Americans to the COVID virus. Over 4000 people died on inauguration day.  The number of people dying from the virus ran between two and four thousand a day from late November through February 26.  That was the last day more than two thousand Americans died from the disease.  It’s been going down steadily since February 12, when 5463 of us died.  Yesterday, 1270 Americans died from COVID. 

It’s likely because of the large number of us who have been vaccinated that the deaths from COVID will continue to go down.  I heard on the news this morning that yesterday, about 2.5 million were vaccinated across the country.  They’re vaccinating people down to the age of 50 around here, and the age is younger than that in many places.  I heard the other day there are areas where anyone over the age of 18 can be vaccinated.  That’s pretty amazing.

I was trying to figure out how we got to this point with vaccinations so quickly, and then I remembered that the only way to make things happen in large organizations is to kick ass and take names. I don’t have any special access to White House “insiders,” nor do I have any sources at the CDC or the NIH, but that is apparently what Joe Biden has been doing since January 20.  I would be willing to bet that the day he took office, Biden got a bunch of people in the Oval Office and said something along the lines of, “No excuses.  Get this done.”  That’s what people in large organizations respond to:  a take-charge attitude from somebody who means business.

That’s what Donald Trump never did from the earliest days of the pandemic.  He never got the top people in his administration in one place and gave them an order like, “get this done.”  With all of his insane “task force” press conferences in the White House, he never addressed the American people directly and said, “this is what it’s going to take to beat this disease.  I want every American to do the following.”  He could have then listed the best advice from medical experts, like wearing masks and not gathering indoors in even small groups and keeping your distance from one another.  He could have gotten all 50 governors on a call and ordered them to impose mask mandates and other restrictive measures to control the disease.  He could have told every governor to issue executive orders in their states carrying out his orders.  He could have taken charge of a national campaign to defeat the virus before it spread so widely that tens of thousands would die.

That’s what people wanted.  They wanted to know what to do to avoid getting sick, and they wanted someone in authority to tell them to do it.  Donald Trump never got the enormous force of the entire federal government behind the essential task of saving lives.  He didn’t want to be a bad guy to his base.  He didn’t want to be seen taking advice from pointy-headed experts and libs.  He never kicked ass and took names. 

Instead, he held mass rallies where masks were not required, at least one of them indoors.  He went out and played golf every weekend.  He paid so little attention to the health advice of his own experts that many in his own White House got the virus.  He got sick himself, and according to at least one recent report, he was much more badly sick than we were told at the time.  He sat there in the White House and denied what was going on all across the country of which he was president.  By his denial and inaction, he let 400,000 people die.  If he was still president, there is no way I would have gotten my second shot today.

Conditioned by the way things had been going for the last year, Tracy and I figured we wouldn’t be vaccinated until mid-summer.  She gets her first vaccination tomorrow.  We’ll both be fully vaccinated against COVID by my birthday.

Thank you, President Biden. I couldn’t ask for a better present.