You will never hear “the buck stops here” from Baltimore City politicians. This time, city leaders have been quick to point fingers at state administrators for the botched vaccine rollout. This is nothing new. From broken schools to budget shortfalls, claiming credit for trivial progress while reassigning responsibility for major failures is a dependable political tradition in Baltimore.

In the context of vaccine distribution, however, data showing how much worse the city is doing compared to other Maryland counties makes it hard for Baltimore politicians like Mayor Brandon Scott to pin blame solely on the governor. In February, for example, Baltimore City (the fourth most populous jurisdiction) received the third highest allocation of vaccines statewide yet manages to get the smallest fraction of that allocation into people’s arms.

Even worse, only half of those doses went to city residents. That is partly because health care workers were prioritized in the very first phase of the rollout, and Baltimore boasts 11 hospitals anchoring its neighborhoods. But it is also because of a busted transit grid, lack of communication with the community, inadequate health care infrastructure, digital access deficits among the elderly generally and Black residents specifically, and the same incompetence and inefficiencies that plague every other operation in Baltimore, from fighting crime to fixing potholes.

Those are local challenges, and certain localities have simply been better at addressing them. Baltimore County, for example, has devoted CARES funds to pay for Uber rides for residents without transportation. Indeed, a side-by-side comparison of Baltimore City and Prince George’s County, Maryland’s two majority Black jurisdictions, is especially revealing.

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