Government of Western Virginia Jim Justice praised the success of the spread of the coronavirus vaccine, claiming that if the mountain state had the “doses on Valentine’s Day, every person in this state, 65 years and older, would be vaccinated. ”
West Virginia has spent the past three weeks as number one or number two in the country for vaccine doses administered per capita, according to the Covid-19 Vaccination Tracker of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The state also boasts a first-dose administration rate of 95.2% and a second-dose vaccination rate of 46.8%, according to the vaccine data published Wednesday on the Covid-19 dashboard in West Virginia.
Justice has broken down its ‘all-in’ approach to distributing the Covid vaccine on CNBC’s ‘The News with Shepard Smith’.
“We did not necessarily follow the federal approach, we followed a practical approach and an overall approach,” Justice said during a Wednesday night interview. “We brought along our National Guard, our local pharmacies, our local health care staff and our local health clinics and everything.”
Justice added that the West Virginia model ‘is not a rocket science; it’s just about moving and not sitting back and planning a strategy. ‘
However, the explosion of the vaccine remains slower than expected in several countries across the country. Wisconsin, for example, lagged behind and, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, distributed only 42.5% of its doses of Covid vaccine. Government Tony Evers called the state’s vaccination of vaccine “a bit bumpy”. Evers said his state did not receive enough vaccines from the federal government and that those who administered vaccines needed more time to prepare.
West Virginia administered nearly 12,000 doses, 77% of their dose. Justice has emphasized the importance of putting older Americans at the forefront of a vaccination strategy.
“We only looked one way at this, and that was age and age, and we knew we had to move,” Justice said. “We didn’t want vaccines sitting on a shelf, we needed them in people’s arms.”
According to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data, January 2021 is already the worst month in the US since the coronavirus pandemic suffered more than 79,000 deaths. It is a gloomy milestone that surpassed the December record with more than a thousand deaths.