I can’t wait until they start delivering the vaccine the next day to Prime members. DAVID RYDER / GETTY IMAGES
The trillion dollar company that ranks among one of the few companies absolutely gaining ground during the COVID-19 locks would like you to know that it has partnered with Virginia Mason to run a pop-up vaccination site at the Amazon Meeting Center in South Lake Union from 8:30 am to 4 pm this Sunday.
At the one-day event, Virginia Mason volunteers plan to administer 2,000 vaccines to anyone who is eligible, regardless of insurance status. Find out if you are eligible for the jab with the state’s PhaseFinder tool and enter the hospital waiting list here.
Amazon’s senior vice president of global corporate affairs, Jay Carney, announced the temporary website at the Governor’s Inslee press conference on Thursday. The company will also lend one of its executives to the Washington State Vaccine Command and Coordination Center to, you know, “leverage our operations, information technology, logistics and communications” in ways that can help put more vaccines in the arms, said Carney. Carney concluded by mentioning a plan to pay a third-party occupational health provider to administer the vaccine to eligible recipients at their own call centers.
I did not hear A lot of about Amazon going out in support of any state or federal taxes to help pay for chronically underfunded public health departments charged with maintaining mass vaccination sites across the state, while using outdated and disparate systems in an already desperate health care system fragmented, but I do want to take this moment to thank you for contributing. (At the press conference, Governor Inslee said “[Amazon has] has not asked for any reward “for his help and he is” hopeful that they will continue to help us … in other ways. “So I think there is still time to grow, but I am not holding my breath.)
Meanwhile, Snohomish County is already running three mass vaccination sites and they have plans to open several more. King County pledged to open two locations in the southern part of the county on February 1 and then ten in total at some point. Next week, the state Department of Health plans to build sites in Spokane, Kennewick, Wenatchee and Ridgefield.
The directors of all of these health departments say they could speed up the planning and construction process for these sites if they could count on more vaccine supplies arriving. In order to meet Inslee’s goal of vaccinating 45,000 Washingtonians a day, Inslee said the federal government would need to “triple” its production, as we already vaccinate more people a day than the feds can keep up with in terms of dosage. The governor said he did not know when he would learn more about the supply increase, but he expressed confidence in “having a partner in the White House who can really help us”. According New York Times, the country’s vaccine supply is unlikely to increase until April.
In the past few weeks, that state has slowly increased its vaccine allocation rate from 26% on January 8 to 44% today (or 52% if you don’t count vaccines for long-term treatment patients, which private pharmacies provide for through a program governed by the federal government).
So far, Washington’s healthcare providers have received nearly 830,000 doses of the vaccine, but have placed only 362,000 doses in their arms. Inslee said that those figures, which still seem a little low considering, put us “in 13th place in the country now for vaccines that have been applied”. This is true for the number of shots fired, but the state ranks 33rd in terms of the percentage of the population that received at least one shot, according to one New York Times score.
State health department officials cite several reasons for the low numbers, including the feds’ lack of transparency regarding the number of people in long-term care facilities that they actually vaccinated and data / communication problems related to elderly dependency and disparate immunization systems. However, Washington’s health secretary, Dr. Umair Shah, pointed to the increasing percentage of vaccine distribution as evidence that things are going to get better.