I’m not developing this thought, particularly, but my reaction to the news that the Defense department will send 1,000 troops to support mass vaccination sites is can’t we hire anyone who isn’t a soldier?
I know there’s a long and noble tradition of using our military for ‘civilian’ tasks in emergency situations, but it kinda feels like the non-military capacity of our government is just… depleted. And that’s leaving aside the question of whether troops are the right people—I assume that there are at least a thousand people in our military who can be found for any specialized task. And it’s not a criticism specifically of the current administration, even though they knew this was coming and could have had a plan ready for hiring civilians. But I guess we don’t hire civilians these days.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
I think that the issue here is primarily what is getting reported in the news, not what is actually happening with respect to running the COVID-19 vaccination program across the United States.
People are definitely getting hired to do vaccination work. That’s not a national news story, however, because the vaccination program is being run through the states, and actual vaccinations are being carried out by county health departments, so it’s the county health departments who are hiring people: the civilian hiring process is being spread over thousands of county health departments. “Defense Department will send a thousand troops” gets a national headline, while “County to hire 10 workers for COVID-19 vaccination program” might or might not make the local paper. My home county’s health department recently got approval to hire somewhere in the range of 5-15 people (can’t remember the exact number) to do vaccinations for COVID-19, using federal money that has come to county governments to use to address the pandemic. If this hiring is replicated on a similar per capita scale around the country, then county health departments are in the process of hiring between 6000 and 18,000 people to do vaccinations.
Given the scale of the challenge of vaccinating the entire adult population of the United States in 9 months, resources need to be brought to bear on the problem from all directions. Since the U.S. is already paying members of its active-duty armed services who have the necessary training, transferring those resources to the vaccination project is reasonable way to supplement an already large-scale effort to hire people.
Additionally, the military’s commitment to provide resources can plug gaps that arise in the fabric of civilian health programs. Vaccination work requires some level of health-care training (the person I know personally who has been hired to do vaccination work is unemployed health-care worker who had been laid off from a local nursing home — she’s very stoked about her vaccination job!), so money to hire civilians isn’t the only constraint on getting vaccination teams in place: there need to be people in the area with the necessary skills who are available to be hired. Active-duty troops can be deployed to go to places where the local health care resources are not sufficient to carry out the vaccination program at the level necessary.
It would be helpful, though, if we could get reporting that would give the public a full and accurate picture of what getting the nation vaccinated is going to take, and what’s being done to make it happen.