Aiming to increase the slow pace of administration of Covid-19 vaccines, Washington Governor Jay Inslee said on Monday that the state turned to Starbucks to help streamline logistics and set a new goal of delivering 45,000 doses per day.
Starbucks has appointed 11 employees with experience in labor and deployment, operations and research and development to work full-time on vaccine distribution in their home state, the company said.
Inslee said the state is also seeing more than 2,000 pharmacies administer vaccines and open vaccination posts. Microsoft, another Seattle-based company, will also create a vaccine site to carry out 5,000 vaccinations a day, he said.
“This is a unique challenge for the United States and in all states to face a full mobilization of our resources,” said Inslee. “We did this in World War II, when we built Liberty ships here in Washington state. We reached levels of production that no one could imagine because we set ambitious goals. “
The two vaccines approved for use in the United States are remarkably effective, but implementation across the country has been slow since they started being launched a month ago. Across the country, 12.2 million people received a dose of coronavirus vaccines, according to data from 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 the end of 2020.
“We can’t think it’s an acceptable pace,” said Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson. “So we have to scale dramatically and accelerate progress.”
Inslee, a Democrat, said the state underestimated the difficulty of vaccinating all health workers before moving on to other populations and that fewer people signed up for the vaccine than expected.
“We are facing the same challenges that all states face because we start with the most difficult part of it – which is a very small group, which is health professionals,” he said. “And to identify and vector them on the websites – this has been a slower part of the process. Now let’s start today to open this up to people over 65. It is much easier to communicate and coordinate this group to get them in. “
Starbucks began discussions with the state of Washington over a partnership to launch vaccines earlier this month. Washington, which has a population of 7.6 million, only 31,581 people received both doses of the coronavirus vaccine, according to data from the CDC. This week, the state began allowing people over 65 to be vaccinated.
Starbucks employees assigned to work on vaccine distribution will use the company’s computer system simulation modeling to find ways to streamline vaccines, according to the state and the company. The company and Washington hope the partnership will create an improved vaccine distribution network across 39 state counties and 29 tribal nations.
President-elect Joe Biden said last week that he would send the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Guard to help establish vaccine clinics across the country to meet the goal of administering 100 million vaccines in the first 100 days of his term. .
Several states have started to work with large pharmacy chains to expand the distribution of vaccines to healthcare professionals. Although West Virginia vaccinated more residents per capita than any other state, working with small independent pharmacies instead of large chains.
Several Democratic governors last week, including Inslee, said the Trump administration had misled them about whether there was a national stockpile of Covid-19 vaccines withheld for the second dose. Inslee said the federal government told governors that there was a strategic reserve.
Inslee said he is much more confident that the Biden government will do a better job of delivering vaccines to states.
“I am confident that we will have a much better relationship,” said Inslee. “That the federal government will not knowingly deceive us as the previous government did. That’s why I feel very good about our federal partnership in the future. “
