The Wall Street Journal reports:

Three weeks into the most ambitious vaccination campaign in modern U.S. history, far fewer people than expected are being immunized against Covid-19, as the process moves slower than officials had projected and has been beset by confusion and disorganization in many states.

As a result, the federal government came nowhere close to vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020, as it had promised.

Of the more than 12 million doses of vaccines from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. with BioNTech SE that have been shipped, only 2.8 million have been administered, according to federal figures.

The reported shortfall is due in part to a lag in reporting data using new tools, government officials and health experts said. But as the federal government has left it to states to determine what to do with the vaccines it ships to them, and with some states pushing decision-making to local health departments and hospitals, the process has gone far from smoothly.

People in Florida are waiting in hourslong lines to get shots on a first-come, first-served basis. Some West Virginians got a Covid-19 treatment instead of vaccines. A medical practice in Texas had only two workers sign up to take the shots. While some states received fewer doses than they expected and some hospitals got their first ones this week, other health-care providers have more doses than they know what to do with and are scrambling to find enough syringes to use them. [Continue reading…]