MEMPHIS, Tennessee — In Thursday’s Ransom Note: was the vaccine fiasco really a fiasco?
New reporting from the Memphis Business Journal tonight found the state health department exaggerated vaccine inventory problems at the Shelby County Health Department.
Who can forget that day on February 23rd when the state stripped the county's authority for handling vaccines, handed the keys to the city, and accused the county of mismanagement and a lack of leadership for having 30,000 excess vaccines in storage. Several people lost their jobs, including director Dr. Alisa Haushalter.
But an open records request by the Memphis Business Journal showed the state and county exchanged several emails before the state swooped in and declared to the public all those excess doses sitting on shelves, a number now apparently no one knows where it came from.
Of course, the problem went deeper. There's the thousands of wasted doses, reports of stolen doses, children getting doses, not to mention the thousands of people with appointments who were turned away. But after ruining the county health department's reputation, the state has some explaining to do.
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