The U.S.' vaccine rollout is world-beating

The U.S. vaccine rollout is not going fast enough. Currently, about 1.7 million shots are being put into arms per day:

At that rate, according to the Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker, it will take 8 months to vaccinate 75% of the population (or essentially the entire adult population) with a two-dose vaccine. That’s not nearly fast enough, as more transmissible and antibody-resistant virus strains are spreading fast. Meanwhile we’re firing doctors for giving out vaccine doses out of order to prevent them from expiring, and we don’t even know how many doses the country is wasting. We need faster production and faster distribution. And we need a massive long-lasting upgrade of supply chains and distribution systems so we can quickly get booster shots into arms if and when a fully resistant strain emerges.

But. That said, it’s time to acknowledge a fact that few people seem to be acknowledging: The U.S. vaccine rollout, for all its faults, is ahead of almost every other country in the entire world. For those of us who were only recently wringing our hands about American decline, the fact of U.S. vaccine leadership provides a bracing counterexample and a reason to hope that the American system still retains a bit of the magic we were once taught to expect.