You Have to Admit...It's Getting Better...
A little better...all the time...Because that's how logistics works.
The U.S. has administered 168,592,075 covid 19 vaccines. That’s more than a quarter of the covid 19 vaccines administered on the planet. And it’s more than any other country in the world. Our population of over 340 million Americans is now 19% completely vaccinated against covid 19. Nearly all of our over 65 population who are willing to get vaccinated have been vaccinated. Over a third of our population has received one shot. And the number is growing at over 3 million vaccinations a day.
In January, President Biden set a goal of delivering 100M doses in 100 days. America accomplished the goal in 58 days and is on pace to more than double it by the deadline.
It’s undeniable. The U.S. is moving faster and more effectively than any country on earth. At our current pace the U.S. could vaccinate the entire population of Israel, the gold standard to date for vaccination roll out, in three days.
There’s lots of opportunities to moralize about the government response to covid in America. We certainly lost far too many Americans in the outbreak. A half a million people in less than a year is too many. There’s no other way to slice it. I was highly critical of the Trump administration’s lack of transparency or steady leadership tone. But I also was clear that I wasn’t entirely sure what the measurable impacts to improvement in outcomes might be if the federal government woke up one day and behaved like grown-ups. The heterodoxy in approach and variance in outcomes is still pretty mysterious. I imagine we’ll learn a lot from the data in retrospect.
What we do know, and what people that work in mobilization efforts and logistics have always known, is that things work a certain way in this world. And we need to remember how they work and what’s important so we might do big and daring things in the future.
Here’s what matters:
The last mile is the most visible, highest failure and most rapidly improvable aspect of any major logistics effort. And it is nearly always done less efficiently than it will be at the beginning. It will seem a little bit like chaos. And people who don’t understand how it works will believe the world is ending. But it’s not. Because what you want to hear is…”Supply isn’t the problem…it’s delivery.”
When you hear that…the smart people in the room have to stand up and say we’re right where we want to be. And we’ll solve the last mile pretty quickly. And we’ll solve it by shipping and letting the gears of improvement knock the rough edges off the imprecise machine.
That’s the way the logistics world works. The genius of Bezos was using books to train the machine. Every book logistically can store and ship the same way because of roughly uniform size and shape. So the lift and ship remained the same while the matching function got trained to make sure the right book got to the right person. He knew he had to get the supply chain moving first and get the last mile smarter over time. Two decades later I speak some words into the air and a robot makes sure my mushroom coffee shows up 6 hours later.
Vaccines are no different.
I received my first vaccine in February. And the process was rough. The scheduling app didn’t scale well and was buggy. It didn’t have a well-established sad path to turn people away. Which means that if you didn’t get an appointment, it left you feeling with a sense of chaos. If you did, it was fine. That’s the secret to an experience by the way. If the happy path is happy, you just have to work on making that path available for more people. If the happy path isn’t happy…you don’t have an experience. The sad path is always an easy fix. Just make a better screen with better words.
At the site there were lines in weird places, lots of paper and no parking. The building was too small. And the people there were covering the process gap with hard work, fast thinking and improvisation. That’s what we marvelous making apes do. I’ve stood up enough operations to know what “week 2” looks like. When I came back three weeks later to the high school gym they repurposed with clear queues multiple administration nodes and a funny security guard telling jokes to the line, it looked like week 5.
Now we’re on month 4. And we’re vaccinated 40 Americans every second of every day.
Nearly every news site and media outfit was spinning chaos stories and individual tales of nightmare and woe. That’s what they do. “Things are progressing as planned” is a lousy lede. Mistakes will happen. When they do, the machine ingests it as feedback and corrects. If anyone wants to know what leading through one of those feedback loops sounds like, here’s a good example.
Here’s what matters. Is whatever you need to roll out rolling out? And is it getting faster and more accurate? Is there a target? And how are we doing relative to the target?
We plan to go to the moon by the end of the decade.
We plan to roll out 100M vaccines in a hundred days….
We’re on our way.
Amen.