Q&A of the Day – Is Biden the administration withholding vaccines from Florida? Part 2
Bottom Line: Last week proved to be another week of mostly empty promises from the Biden administration regarding the number of first dose vaccines they’d make available for use within Florida. While better than the previous week, first doses were still 29% lower than the week of January 10th - the last full week of the vaccination rollout under than Trump administration. So how have Florida’s trends with COVID vaccines compared with other states? Are we potentially being treated differently than other states? Could politics be behind it? The answer is yes to one of those questions and maybe to the other. In Florida’s peak week for vaccines – January the 10th, we received 387,941 vaccines out of 5,590,949 issued nationally. That’s 6.9% and is consistent with Florida’s population relative to the US population. What’s happening most recently?
Last week, the week of February 7th, a total of 11,673,417 vaccines were made available nationally. Florida only received 274,882, or 2.4% of them. That’s a population adjusted decline of 66% under the Biden administration and is well below our state’s relative share which is approx.. 6.7%. As always there remain two sides to stories and one side to facts. It’s a fact that Florida had received COVID vaccines on a schedule relative to our population size during the Trump administration. It’s a fact that Florida is only receiving about 34% of its share relative to population under the Biden administration. It’s also a fact that the Biden administration made a false and misleading statement regarding Florida’s use of vaccines in its earliest days. Is politics behind the Biden administration’s pitiful issuance of vaccines to Florida? I don’t know. Is it possible? Yes. What I can tell you empirically is that Florida is being substantially underserved with COVID vaccines by the Biden administration to date.
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