Washington Governor Jay Inslee sought to increase the slow pace of administration of Covid-19 vaccines, saying the state had turned to Starbucks for help simplifying logistics and setting a new target of 45,000 doses. per day.
Starbucks has assigned 11 employees with expertise in labor and deployment, operations and research and development to work full-time to distribute vaccines in its home state, the company said, adding that the number of employees could change.
Inslee said the state also arranges for more than 2,000 pharmacies to do vaccinations and set up the vaccination sites. Microsoft, another Seattle-based company, will also set up a website to perform 5,000 vaccinations a day.
“It is a unique challenge for the United States and in each state to set up a total mobilization of our resources,” Inslee said. “We did it in World War II when we built the Liberty ships here in Washington state. We reached production levels that no one could have imagined because we set ambitious goals.”
The two vaccines approved for use in the United States, which require two shots, are remarkably effective, but the rollout nationwide has been slow since they began dating a month ago. Nationwide, 12.2 million people received one dose of one of the vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and only 1.6 million received both doses, out of a total population of 330.8 million Americans. The Trump administration has promised to vaccinate 20 million Americans by 2020.
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“We can not think it’s an acceptable fit,” said Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson. “We must therefore scale it up dramatically and accelerate progress.”
Inslee, a Democrat, said the state underestimates how difficult it is to vaccinate all health workers quickly before going to other populations and that fewer people have reported vaccinations than they expected.
“We have the same challenges that every state has had because we started with the more difficult part of this – which is a fairly select small group, which are health workers,” he said. “And to identify it and pull in on the sites – it was a slower part of the process. Now we’ll start today to open it up to people over 65. It’s much easier to communicate that group and to coordinate. to get them in. ‘
Starbucks started with the state earlier this month. Only 31,581 people received both doses in Washington, which according to CDC data has 7.6 million inhabitants. This week, the state began allowing people over the age of 65 to be vaccinated.
According to the state and the company, Starbucks employees working on the distribution of vaccines will use the company’s computer simulation system. Starbucks and Washington hope the partnership will create an improved vaccine distribution network in the 39 provinces and 29 tribal countries.
Elected President Joe Biden said last week that he would use the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Guard to help set up vaccination clinics across the country to achieve a goal of providing 100 million shots in the first 100 days of his term. serve.
Several states have begun working with large pharmacy chains to expand the distribution of vaccines to health workers. West Virginia has vaccinated more residents per capita than any other state by working with small, independent pharmacies instead of the big chains.
Several Democratic governors, including Inslee, said last week that the Trump administration had misled them about whether to keep a national stockpile of second-dose vaccines. Inslee said the federal government has told governors that there is a strategic reserve.
Inslee said he has great confidence that the Biden government will do a better job of distributing vaccines to the states.
“I am confident that we will have a much better relationship, that the federal government is not going to deliberately mislead us like the previous government,” he said. “And that’s why I feel very good that our federal partnership is moving forward.”
CORRECTION (January 19, 2021, 18:00 ET): An earlier version of this article was incorrectly posted at Microsoft Corp. It’s based in Redmond, Washington, not Seattle.