Wicked Chinchilla: jjorsett: Pushing distribution decisions to the states makes the most sense, rather than having DC try to make policy for everyone. Biden will do the same thing and suddenly you'll all be fine with it because it won't be a Trump policy any more.

No actually, not at all.

Federal leadership is needed to:
1) Ensure coordinated distribution from the production facilities to all 50 states.  To give the vaccine, states have to HAVE the vaccine.  We all have seen the abject failure of leaving acquisition to states when it came to PPE, vaccines would be an even BIGGER cluster fark if states are left to handle acquisition on their own.  Production and shipping bottlenecks/competition would be worse since there are far fewer manufacturers, plus you have cold chain issues to work out... and then you have...prioritization..continued in my next point.

2)  Feds should set prioritization guidelines at minimum or ideally just set official policy requirements states HAVE to follow.  Otherwise some states will distribute on a voluntary basis alone, others might prioritize healthcare workers, the vulnerable, some may even have a first come first serve or whoever can pay policy.  If you have different standards between states now you have all the problems of distributing vaccines with people running the full spectrum of avoiding shots if they are required to driving across state lines to get them.  Which is hugely problematic to make sure states get what they need if some are under distributing and others are over distributing relative to their expected demand. and then you get to... dose tracking, continued below.

3) For the two part vaccines, you have to somehow keep track of who has received the first dose and needs the second vs. who is good.  You want to throw out-of-staters into that? Now state-based tracking doesn't work, and not all hospitals are even digitized.  The feds could create a system to keep track of it otherwise you are just dependent upon people to come back for their second dose and often times they are really not good at this.

Not having a federal plan in place isn't just an abject failure of leadership, its dereliction of duty at least and at worst could be described as purposeful sabotage since we know the problems that can arise from not planning and they have chosen to say fark it.