In a crisis, Washington should fully embrace its many strengths, and also those of the private sector.
It’s not surprising that pharmacies are turning out to be fantastic at distributing Covid-19 vaccines. As Alex Tabarrok and I pointed out in February, they are literally everywhere — 86% of the US population lives within 5 miles of one. And they have significant experience in large-scale vaccine delivery, giving out 40-50 million flu vaccines annually. But the success of pharmacies raises an important question about another part of the effort: the federally-run mass vaccination sites. 1 Managed by FEMA, staffed by the National Guard and flush with federal funds, they are underperforming the Biden administration’s expectations, according to Politico. There’s a broader lesson here about how the government can combine its strengths with those of the private sector to deliver for its citizens during crises and beyond. When it comes to committing enormous amounts of capital to provide public goods — like developing vaccines as quickly as possible — the U.S. government is hard to match. That’s what it did with Operation Warp Speed, putting over $10 billion into vaccine development and production, and securing manufacturing and pricing commitments that ensured Americans would benefit from any of the vaccine bets that paid off. The government can also use its authority to get firms working towards a shared goal. In the past few months, the Biden administration has helped coordinate supply chains for vaccines and the manufacturing of personal protective equipment. It also brokered a vaccine production collaboration between competing pharmaceutical manufacturers Merck & Co.
