In Praise Of Yelling "Fix It!"

In the long term, executives leveraging emergency power to ram through meaningful change is probably bad, but that's how they're currently breaking through bureaucratic COVID restrictions.

Due to requests from my paid subscribers, I’ve opened up last Friday’s newsletter. In it, I make another attempt to walk through how the vaccine works because, once we know how it works, we can recognize with some confidence that the “vaccines don’t stop you from transmitting the virus” line that I keep hearing over and over is simply not very plausible.

It may come as a surprise to you, but I’ve been trying to follow COVID data pretty closely for some time now. I’m still working through a number of data questions, but the one I’ve come to marvel at are the details of vaccination availability.

• The Surprising Non-Impact of Vaccine Eligibility

• Yelling FIX IT!

• Looney Tunes: For Scent-Imental Reasons

The Surprising Non-Impact of Vaccine Eligibility

People are still fighting their way through all the various states to get their vaccines. Here in Washington, I keep seeing friends my age and younger getting their vaccines in other states and people here are growing impatient. After all, we did pretty well with COVID numbers, we were cautious, we’ve been in various stages of lockdown for a year, that must be proof that we have an effective administrative state that can handle things. Why are all our friends in other states getting vaccinated?

The CDC has been adding more and more values to their vaccine data as the weeks roll on and it’s now a wealth of information on which brands of vaccines have been administered and by which states and to which age groups.

The states have been all over the map in declaring which age groups are eligible for the vaccine. About half the states are still at “60 or older” with most (including Washington) still limiting it to 65+ and North Dakota limiting it to 75+.

Of course, these are soft limits since there are more exceptions in different states than I can list here. There are exemptions for medical personnel, for people living in communal housing, for “essential workers” (which is defined a hundred different ways), for teachers or other childcare workers, even for specific comorbidities like obesity.

Even so, one would expect that the age limits would roughly correspond to a pattern in which the elderly are getting priority. Maybe the places that continue to have high age limits are pushing really hard on getting the senior population to a high level of vaccination before opening it up. Or maybe those who are opening up are doing so because they already have a high level of senior vaccinations.

I regret to inform you that there seems to be no discernable pattern whatsoever.

The state with the highest level of senior vaccinations is Vermont, which formally limits vaccinations to 60 and above. The lowest level of senior vaccinations is Hawaii, whose limit is 65+. State limits on vaccine age distribution seem to have no impact on more seniors getting vaccines.

But then when you look at the vaccination numbers for the overall adult population, a strange thing happens: Nothing.

This is a little hard to read, but many of the states that seemed to have a low percentage of seniors vaccinated seem to be doing better with the overall population… even if they overall population seems like they shouldn’t be able to get the vaccine based on age restrictions.

I don’t have a solid theory on this other than to say that it looks a lot to me like having an age-restriction policy makes very little difference in who actually gets vaccinated and that people are going to go get the vaccines if they want them. At the very least, I think we can say that the policies put in place are not having a very visible or predictable effect.

I would also encourage us not to look at these charts and say “oh well such-and-such a state is at the bottom, they must suck at this”. Forty-nine states are between 60% and 85% of seniors vaccinated. Forty-seven states are between 30% and 45% of their adult population vaccinated. The “low” states are likely about 2-3 weeks behind the “high” states. That’s not the end of the world and it’s not reason for despair. We’re getting there.

Yelling “Fix It”

I’ve watched with some astonishment over the last year as states have had massively different COVID restriction policies and massively different vaccine policies and those policies didn’t seem to move the needle very much in the end result.

I’ve watched as political groups fight with each other over small concessions, as teacher’s unions fight for weeks over 6-feet instead of 3-feet, over letting kids eat lunch together, over group A and group B split hybrid. Here in Washington, we have been caught in the great quibble-fight of 2021 as our school district hatches plans to return, plans to help teachers plan to return, plans to schedule busses around the return. Every plan involves more planning, more micromanaging, more fights over the smallest things. It seemed we would never go back. The needle seemed to be barely moving.

And then our governor Jay Inslee told them to “FIX IT!”

If you’re not familiar with the FIX IT sketch from SNL, take a moment to watch it, because it’s hilarious. The delight in the sketch is in the panic of an expert delivering no detailed or practical solutions to the problem, but simply telling “them” to “FIX IT”.

It’s a simple 3 step process. Step 1: FIX. Step 2: IT. Step 3: FIX IT. Repeat steps one, two, and three until it’s all FIXED.

That’s basically what happened in Washington. Inslee declined to sort through any of the details of opening up schools and simply said “You will do this thing. Solve the problem by April 19th. I don’t care about your other plans. Get it done.”

And they did. All the previous plans to painfully, erratically, incrementally open schools were tossed into the trash. We we were doing 2 half-days a week for elementary students and, for middle and high schools, no in-person class at all. That plan was scrapped and our school district said “OK. the old plan is trash, we’re doing in-person classes, four full-days per week.”

I feel like the same FIX IT plan is what President Biden put in place for vaccine availability. He simply said “Every state make the vaccines available to everyone by May 1st. Period. I don’t care what your other plans were. Fix it.”

And then last week Washington announced that they would make vaccines available for everyone by May 1st.

My big takeaway from this is that most bureaucratic objections are not intended to help solve a problem but to delay solving it. We have been told for months that we need to ease back into full in-person schooling and that we couldn’t rush the process. Now I see that we absolutely can rush the process. We don’t need incremental steps. We can simply say “this is what is happening” and make it happen.

Now, it may very well be that this is only possible in a world of one-party control. It may be that a leader needs to use emergency powers to turn the rusty wheels of bureaucratic drag. It may be that this was always possible and that we should take that into account as we wonder why this strategy was not enacted months ago. If it is true that what we need to get things done is a stubborn executive with emergency powers who doesn’t care how things get fixed so long as they are FIXED, this is probably bad news in the long-term even if it is delivering us good results in the short term.

But also, we really needed to get some good short term results. We needed them to fix it.

Looney Tunes: For Scent-Imental Reasons

I am currently reading Chuck Jones’ autobiography and it is a masterpiece, a tribute to humanity, grace, and art. Jones spends a lot of his time writing loving tributes to his co-workers and hilarious put-downs of the executives he despised. The script for this short was written by Michael Maltese, a plumber who stumbled into a cartoon studio one day and worked his way into the Warner Brothers animation team.

This is so delightfully silly with it’s absurd fake French, the multiple fake suicide attempts, and the turn-about-is-fair-play at the end. It’s exceptionally well paced, split into a few really well executed scenes.

I was a little surprised to see how many of the classic Looney Tunes Mike Maltese wrote. What’s Opera, Doc, Robbin Hood Daffy, Ali Baba Buny, One Froggy Evening, Duck Amuck, Duck Dodgers, Rabbit Fire and (my personal favorite) Feed the Kitty. What a batch of classics!