Biden recently increased his vaccine target to 1.5 million doses a day. At present, the US is averaging 1.35 million. Soon, however, ramped up supply from Pfizer and Moderna as well as the expected approval of the Johnson & Johnson dose will, according to the New York Times, mean the availability of 3 million doses a day. The main impediment will then be logistical: how quickly America can get doses from factories into people. Yet exactly how the Biden administration plans to help that process remains unclear. ‘I’m not hearing a plan,’ Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert at Baylor College of Medicine, told the Times. ‘In the public statements, I don’t hear that sense of urgency.’

Meanwhile, public health officials and cable news experts seem determined to downplay the idea that the vaccine is really worth getting by insisting that people shouldn’t change their behaviour after they receive their doses. Why this adamance? I don’t think the lucky vaccinated few should parade around mask-free, but would it hurt to offer some incentives to the millions of Americans hesitant about the vaccine to take the plunge? Given what we know about the vaccines ability to stop spread as well as illness, we can surely live a little once we’ve been inoculated.

The third ingredient in the inertia cocktail is a focus on ‘equity’ that prioritises factors other than speed in the rollout process. Georges Benjamin, the director of the American Public Health Association, told Politico that he’d ‘much rather have a well thought-through consistent response that gets better over time than a hurried, less thoughtful response’. It is an all too typical, urgency-sapping outlook.