More on Gen Perna and Vaccine

 In addition to points in my previous post, a couple of other things occurred to me:

• doing a checklist, or rather a series of checklists, would have been good.  Even though the decision had been made to allow state and local governments to design the system to do the jabs and report the status, my guess is it would have been possible to specify different parts of the operation in detail.  For example, actually giving the vaccination could start with removing the vial from the deep freeze, warming it, etc. etc.  At some point a recording and reporting process would take place.
• one problem with using past processes for vaccinations is that this one has different parameters.  The flu vaccine is requested by the public so you have a sales effort. For covid the attempt is to ration the jabs.  For me, I'm about to hit my 80th birthday, but I've no underlying health condition.  When and how do I learn VA has reached me in the queue? Or do I just call around to pharmacies or Kaiser until someone tells me to come in.  I don't know. 
• I see a report that WV is doing well, perhaps because they gave the job to the National Guard.  I can see how that could fix the notification problem, and perhaps even the checklist point.

Some Sympathy for Gen. Perna

 General Perna is the chief operating officer for Warp Speed, which is now taking some flak for the seemingly slow progress of vaccinating for covid-19.

I never had to deal with his problem, but I have been involved in rolling out programs affecting thousands of counties and a million or so people on a crash basis. The difference between his problems and mine were great:

• the visibility to modern media.  ASCS/FSA programs were visible to local newspapers, but weren't followed nationally or internationally.
• an organizational structure which reached to the end user, the farmer, and one which had long experience in crash programs, dating back to 1933 when it was first set up.
• a program which usually was similar to previous programs--I can't judge how closely the covid-19 program matches the influenza program but it seems quite different.

Just from my back seat position of almost total ignorance, there's some things which didn't happen which should have:

• a tick-tock time schedule. Perna's already apologized for screwing this up. My impression is that there weren't sit-down meetings thrashing through every minute step, which could then be documented in a schedule to establish a base of understanding.
• implementation training. Because a vaccine is just a "jab" in the arm which everyone knows how to give, and because the implementers of the Warp Speed hadn't done this before, it was easy to assume (I assume) that no training was necessary. The reality is that training sessions get everyone on the same page, allow for the identification of areas where silos create problems, and permit exchange of ideas.
• as a former directives person, I suspect whatever directives were issued weren't really in a system.  Part of the problem seems to be lack of delineated authority, but it's also the human tendency to resist systems--to believe that a memo (or these days an email, etc.) handles the immediate problem, without realizing the proliferation of unsystematic directions can worsen problems.

I suspect, given the overall directive of relying on state and local governments to distribute and vaccinate, leaders assumed that those governments had systems in place.  Ass u me.  

I want see to the after-action reports and analyses of the effort to see how wrong this post is.

I also want to restate my sympathy for Perna (unusual for me to feel for a general): doing something new under scrutiny and a time line is a formula for bad public relations.