12 JANUARY 28, 2021 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
A plan, at long last
You can mark Jan. 21, 2021, as the
date in which the country fi nally
began the great turnaround
against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though the virus continues running
rampant and killing thousands
nationwide, last Thursday marked
the real beginning of the end of this
health crisis because of the actions of
President Joe Biden.
The new president signed a number
of executive orders which, eff ectively,
nationalize the pandemic before us —
something that needed to happen when
it fi rst arrived in America last year, but
that Biden’s predecessor never cared
enough to accomplish.
The biggest order that Biden signed
is the enactment of the Defense
Production Act, which mobilizes the
entire country — public and private
industries alike — to make whatever
is necessary to stop the disease in its
tracks, including vaccine production
and distribution.
For New York City and state, the vaccine
situation is dire. The city’s vaccine
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The enactment of the Defense Production Act will play a big role in vaccine production and distribution.
File photo by Carlo Allegri/REUTERS
hubs have closed because the supply
isn’t there to meet the high demand.
COVID-19 cases, meanwhile, continue
to be very high, though they have leveled
off following the holiday surge.
Numbers remain high in Brooklyn and
Queens, though.
Over a seven-day period between
Jan. 15 and Jan. 20, approximately 352
New York City residents lost their lives
to COVID-19, according to data from the
governor’s offi ce. But 238 of those fatalities
occurred in Brooklyn and Queens,
both of which were hard hit during the
fi rst wave of the pandemic last spring.
And the presence of the more-infectious
variant of COVID-19 detected in
Europe looms a menacing threat that
could cause yet another surge if left
unchecked.
Meanwhile, there are reports of millions
of COVID-19 doses nationwide still
in storage that have yet to be distributed
largely due to local and state disconnects
with the federal government.
But those disconnects were the
byproduct of the previous administration’s
failure to chart a united front
against COVID-19 from the start — and
leaving most of the response to the
individual states. That caused more
problems resulting from the lack of
uniformity in mission and scale, and it
resulted in the United States becoming
the global epicenter of the pandemic.
Biden’s executive orders fi nally put
the responsibility for handling this
health crisis where it should have
been from the start: in the hands of the
federal government, with its vast resources
and authority to get whatever
is needed to resolve the pandemic and
save lives.
It will take time for Biden’s actions to
take eff ect, and for New York City to get
the vaccine doses necessary to meet the
demand and overcome COVID-19.
While there’s a long way to go, at least
now we have a path forward to victory
— and a president who wants what’s best
for New York and America.
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