Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — A dose in a freezer isn’t a dose. A dose in an arm is a dose.

If something usable arrives before January, the scarce objects are cold chain, a defensible list of who dies waiting, and a clinic that can run on a Tuesday.

Use all three instruments in an order of honesty. Production authority to make and move the thing. A short federal civilian list that’s genuinely medical — age, congregate care, workers who can’t stay home — rather than a cultural document. Then the states with a functioning machine.

The risk in the civilian formula is elaboration. Every constituency that had a hard year will want a line, and a matrix that can’t be administered in a high-school gymnasium will miss January entirely.

I don’t want a formula so intricate it misses the winter, and I don’t want a governor collecting inventory to make a point.

Novi, MI Correspondent — A plant understands a bottleneck, and the bottleneck on a January vaccine isn’t a philosopher. It’s fill-finish capacity, freezers, and a county that still knows how to run a flu clinic.

Production authority is right for the inputs and the line — vials, stoppers, glass, trucks that don’t sit. States are right for the last six inches, because the last six inches is a parking lot and a nurse.

A formula that tries to correct every social question in the first two million doses will miss the two million, and missing them isn’t equity.

Keep the federal list short enough to fit on a card. Long-term care, the oldest, health workers who can’t work remotely, then step down. A step-down structure is how you avoid a riot of categories.

And if the science turns out to require two doses, the only metric that matters is whether the second one lands on schedule. Everything else is a briefing.

Orange County, CA Correspondent — This county can run volume and still lose a week to a badly drafted priority list.

Allocation is a logistics constitution, not a social one. Federal formulas get asked to be the second thing, and that’s how you get a matrix nobody can administer in a gymnasium.

Production authority belongs on the industrial file — command the scarce inputs so they don’t become a bidding war. States belong on the gymnasium, and product should follow demonstrated capacity to store, schedule, and complete a course, plus the high-risk population count. A jurisdiction that can’t do it should get help rather than a symbolic allocation that spoils.

The federal list has to be short enough to survive contact with a nurse. Age, congregate death risk, hospital staff. Not a tour of every essential-worker argument that will be relitigated on television.

Bismarck, ND Correspondent — Make it. Move it. Get it into an arm.

Production authority for the line. A short federal list for who goes first — old, congregate, hospital. States that can run a clinic get the shipment.

An elaborate formula is a delay. A governor’s souvenir inventory is a delay. Delays are the allocation decision that kills people, and they never look like one.

Wheeling, WV Correspondent — A county health department is the last mile whether Washington likes the map or not.

If a vaccine arrives before the new year, don’t send us a thirty-page matrix and a shipment we can’t store. Send a card we can tape to the wall and a product that doesn’t require a specialist to handle.

High-risk first isn’t a culture war. It’s who dies in a congregate building, and that’s the list.

The federal interest in state performance is the second dose. Whoever completes courses on schedule gets the next shipment, and whoever doesn’t gets help rather than volume.

Jacksonville, FL Correspondent — A port moves what can be scheduled. A vaccine that can’t be scheduled into a clinic is freight that failed.

Production authority for manufacture and priority freight. A short federal medical sequence. States for the needle, and particularly states that already run volume through storms.

A formula attempting to settle American social structure with the first ten million doses won’t settle it and will miss the window.

I’d add that the inauguration should be treated as weather rather than as a gate. A political gate on the timing gets read as theft by whoever isn’t in the photograph, and that reading will outlast the winter.

Long Island, NY Correspondent — I draft emergency allocation annexes, and an annex that can’t be executed in a gymnasium is literature.

The legal instinct will be a federal civilian masterpiece. The operational instinct should be production authority plus state execution, and the operational instinct is correct.

Write a federal card: congregate elderly, descending age, in-person health workers, then a published next ring. Publish it so that a governor can’t freelance a patronage allocation, because that’s the specific state-level risk in the question and it’s not hypothetical.

Grade states on administration rather than on announcements. Keep production authority over the inputs so they don’t become a secondary market, because a secondary market in the first doses is how this becomes a scandal instead of a program.

The inauguration is irrelevant to the protocol and radioactive to the coverage. Ignore it anyway.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — Every answer at this table has treated international allocation as a later file. I would like to speak for the later file, since nobody else is going to.

I understand the domestic logic entirely. A government’s first obligation is to the people who fund it, and no American administration is going to ship the first million doses abroad. I am not asking for that and it would not happen.

What I would ask is that the room notice what is being built while we all agree the question is later. Wealthy governments have spent this spring signing advance purchase agreements for volumes far exceeding their populations, against candidates that mostly will not work. That is prudent portfolio behaviour for each buyer. In aggregate it means the first two years of global manufacturing capacity are already spoken for, and my region is not among the buyers, because we could not have afforded the bets.

So the allocation decision is not actually being deferred to January. It is being made now, in contracts, and it will be presented later as an unfortunate scarcity that nobody chose.

I would say two things to Americans. The first is that a virus in an unvaccinated hemisphere does not respect the purchase agreement, and your own epidemiologists will tell you what that means for variants and for the durability of whatever you achieve at home. The second is more direct. Half the Caribbean’s economy is Americans arriving on aeroplanes. You will want us open, and we will not be open, and the reason will be a contract signed in July of 2020 while everybody agreed the international question was for later.

Put a line in the domestic plan now. Not a large one. A stated fraction, committed in advance, so that later is a date rather than a euphemism.

Cheyenne, WY Correspondent — Production authority to make it. A short list for who is first. States that can run a clinic get the box.

No book-length formula and no souvenir inventory. First doses are arms, and an arm is a county nurse with a card and a cooler. Give her both.