Gov. Charlie Baker testified before Massachusetts lawmakers Thursday on his handling of the state's vaccine distribution plan. Some lawmakers had plenty of criticism for things like the Baker administration's faulty vaccine appointment website. Reporter Mike Deehan, from GBH's State House bureau, broke down the oversight hearing with GBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Arun Rath: This was not the kind of scene we'd ever seen with Baker and the legislature before, right?
Mike Deehan: It's really rare. I mean, I've been covering Baker his entire term, and I don't think he's ever been to an oversight hearing. He's of course testified before lawmakers before, but they've never called him in for an oversight type of thing. It's actually a role that the legislature exercises very, very rarely, even in the Baker era with a Republican in the corner office. There's not a whole lot of oversight hearings for all sorts of different scandals or problems or just general routine stuff. So you're absolutely right that this was a rare event, and it didn't really disappoint.
Rath: Take us through some of the highlights.
Deehan: Democrats were mostly civil. But, you know, senators like Cindy Friedman and Eric Lesser flatly rejected Baker's contention that this vaccination program has been successful. They called the vaccination plan confusing. They said that his policies have been shifting week after week, that communication is incredibly poor when it comes to what towns know, what lawmakers know, what boards of health know, what hospitals and medical providers know week in and week out about this shifting, kind of flexible plan. These lawmakers, they hear from constituents every day that they can't get vaccine appointments, that the website doesn't work, and these lawmakers are faced with these people when the website crashes or when medical providers or local boards of health don't have the vaccine supply that's been restricted by the administration.
Baker will always return to the fact that the entire system really is limited by the frustrating lack of vaccine supplies coming from the federal government, but a lot of these questions were based around that vaccine booking website that of course crashed as soon as people over 65 years old became eligible a few weeks ago. It additionally had problems this morning when a new round of appointments were made available. Lesser, from Longmeadow, confronted Baker over how supplies are actually affecting the website, and it got a little testy. That's something that we just don't really ever see from Democrats when they confront Baker up here.
Rath: So what was Baker's defense, his response to all this criticism of his plan?
Deehan: Baker never misses an opportunity to mention that Massachusetts is now number one among larger states — with equivalent populations or larger — in first doses per capita administered. That's a metric that he's taking a lot of pride in, because we've come a long way over the last few weeks from being a low performer to being one of the higher ones now. Baker credits these mass vaccination sites as the most effective and efficient ways to get shots into arms. So that is the point that he would keep coming to. The refrain Baker always says at these press conferences that I cover most days, and multiple times during his testimony today — and it's a very valid point — is that the supply of vaccine from the federal government has remained low, from 110,000 to 130,000 doses a week. That's just not enough every week to satisfy everyone that is now eligible to get the vaccine. That means that you're going to have a ton more people on those websites than you are going to have appointments. So when it comes to that website, I think Baker looks at a lot of metrics, but the one that's most important to him is that every dose that gets delivered to Massachusetts gets used, and they are. There's very little waste in that supply chain anymore. So the fact that those 50,000 appointments this morning got taken up so fast is because the website is working for its intended purpose. It's designed to get those appointments filled. Baker sees that as a win, and he doesn't think the customer frustration of everyone who didn't get an appointment through that website matters as much as the fact that it accomplished its primary role.
Rath: Baker testified just after 11 a.m., and then it was after that we had his announcement that the state will begin Phase IV of its reopening plan. Is it cynical to think that's not coincidental, the timing?
Deehan: Oh, no, I don't think it's cynical at all. I think it absolutely seems that's the way it went. This is a pretty common technique in politics when the boss is doing something that might not generate a positive story and you do have positive news. I'm not saying they made the decision to reopen Fenway Park and sports stadiums because of this, but they had it ready to go, and it just so happened that that news leaked to The Boston Globe during Baker's appearance before lawmakers. So you can kind of see it as an attempt to influence, let's say, the news coverage today of what's going on. Certainly it's big, valid news that we're going to move into Phase IV less than a month from now. I saw a few people on Twitter with the same cynical reaction, and some political folks who said that they would have probably done the same thing had their boss been in that position. So instead of a day of news coverage of Democrats barraging Baker, here is a more positive story for the administration that, again, is a very valid and real one — it might just accomplish the secondary goal of distracting from another day of website problems and a frustrated legislature.
Rath: You watch the governor and the legislature as closely as anybody. What are your takeaways from today's really unique moment for Baker and for Beacon Hill?
Deehan: The biggest thing that I took away from this is that Democrats are growing a spine for the first time when dealing with Gov. Charlie Baker. What the committee is actually there for is to do oversight. They're going to generate reports. They're going to try to influence how the governor and the administration deals with COVID-19. They're forward looking. They're trying to be constructive and productive to work with the administration, of course, but there's also a political dimension to this. There always is. That could mean that Democrats either on Beacon Hill or within the Democratic Party or somewhere else, they see a weak spot politically in that Baker really is taking a ton of criticism for the first time. I can't tell you how many times I've read that the teflon may be wearing off Baker, although it should be noted that the most recent polls do not reflect that — voters still very much approve of the job the governor is doing.
We did see that some of the politicians up there on that panel, notably Lesser, are willing to criticize Baker in ways that really no Democrats inside the State House have done for the six years that Baker has been in office. So maybe it's not necessarily that the honeymoon between Baker and Democrats is over. Maybe it's been over for a while, but you could look at this as maybe that six-year itch is settling in. We do have a race for governor in 2022, so we'll see if Baker is going to stand for reelection, if any of these lawmakers are going to try to challenge him, if someone like Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey will come out and do something. There are definitely political implications, and you're going to hear the pandemic and the handling of COVID-19 being the top issue, or one of the top issues, a year from now in 2022.
