Overlake Medical Center: Hospital apologizes after inviting donors to apply for Covid-19 vaccine

“We are pleased to share that we have 500 new appointments open at the Overlake COVID-19 vaccine clinic,” said an email from Overlake Medical Center, which also provided a special registration access code.

Overlake sent the email to about 4,000 members of his community “including volunteers, nurses and retired doctors, all employees and about 100 donors from our Foundation database,” according to a hospital statement.

Since January 22, Washington has been in Phase 1B level 1 of the Covid-19 vaccine distribution, according to the state health department website. This means that all people over 65 and those over 50 in multigenerational families are eligible to be vaccinated.

Governor Jay Inslee expressed concern about the emails during a news conference on Tuesday.

“If, in fact, they were giving preference to a VIP list, that was not the way it was done,” he said. “This is not acceptable to us. We need to give everyone a fair shot at the vaccine.”

Hospital officials said in the statement that they understand that a mistake was made. “We recognize that we made a mistake by including a subset of our donors and by not adopting a broader strategy to fill these nominations, and we apologize,” said the statement.

The hospital statement noted that people who received the invitations could only apply if they were legally eligible to receive the vaccine under current Washington state policy.

“Our intention and commitment has always been to administer all vaccines made available to us in a safe, appropriate and efficient manner,” said the hospital.

The hospital statement also said it has administered 11,000 vaccines to date and “will soon administer the vaccines to more than 40,000 community members who have appointments scheduled in our online system”.