I spent about 50 years doing software development, and one constant was that management always reported that projects were going to be finished in less than half the time than they were actually going to take, even if all went well. The series of Covid vaccine availability projections by our Federal leaders seems to follow that trend.

• May 15: “These data make me feel even more confident that we will be able to deliver a few hundred million doses of vaccine by the end of 2020.” — Moncef Slaoui, head of Operation Warp Speed
• June 2: “By the beginning of 2021 we hope to have a couple of hundred million doses.” — Anthony Fauci
• October 8: “We may have up to 100 million doses by the end of the year, enough to cover especially vulnerable population.” — Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services
• October 29: Pfizer “expects to have 30 million to 40 million doses ready to deliver to the US by the end of the year” while Moderna “expects to be able to provide 20 million doses of its candidate to the US by the end of the year.” By my math, that adds up to 50-60 million doses between the two by the end of the year.
• November 18: “Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar expects 40 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines will be ready for distribution by the end of December.”
• December 16: “Twenty million vaccinations this month.” — Alex Azar
• January 1: “As of Friday, the first day of the new year, an estimated 2.8 million vaccine doses have actually been given.”

The vaccine doses are coming, but one might be a bit skeptical about the projected time frames.