I've been trying to sort out the confusing week that was over @GavinNewsom administration's decision to hand over some level (most? all?) of vaccine distribution to an outside entity, which turned out to be Blue Shield.

We still don't know more than a few basics about the plan.

On Monday, Newsom offered only a hint.

"The whole idea is a more unified, statewide network approach, as opposed to bottom up," he said. "Flu vaccines, think flu vaccines, the original construct, bottom up. We want a little bit more of a command function to control variability."

But the view from sources I spoke to that day was the "unified" network plan wasn't yet ready to roll out. By Monday evening, though, conversations in Sacramento included a name: Blue Shield -- almost 2 days before the Newsom admin confirmed that to us. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-27/california-blue-shield-to-oversee-covid-19-vaccination-effort

And that, of course, skips over Tuesday... when California's government operations secretary told reporters the search for a "third party administrator" to run this new state network was still underway.

In retrospect, we don't have any clear idea when Blue Shield was chosen.

We had expected to see some level of additional information by week's end -- the details of what the healthcare company will do, what it will cost, when it'll begin.

All the while, some local public health and govt officials have wondered whether a new system will really help.

And layered on top of this (or perhaps underneath) is the quandary over data collection and reporting, the ongoing feeling of apples-to-oranges comparisons in federal and state tabulations of vaccine doses administered.

So we appear to be ending the week with a fair amount of confusion about the role that Blue Shield will play and the ability of anyone -- feds, state, locals, the public and press -- to have a full, (semi) real-time sense of how vaccine efforts are really going in CA.

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