West Virginia Governor Jim Justice praised the successful distribution of the coronavirus vaccine in his state and said that if the mountain state had “doses until Valentine’s Day, everyone in this state, aged 65 age or older, would be vaccinated “.
West Virginia has spent the past three weeks as state number one or number two in the country in doses of vaccines administered per capita, according to the Covid-19 Vaccination Tracker at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The state also boasts a 95.2% first dose administration rate and a 46.8% second dose vaccination rate, according to vaccine data published in West Virginia’s Covid-19 panel on Wednesday .
Justice broke his state’s “all in” approach to distributing the Covid vaccine on CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith”
“We don’t necessarily take the federal approach, we take a practical approach and we take a comprehensive approach,” Justice said during an interview on Wednesday night. “We brought in our National Guard, our local pharmacies, our local health personnel and our local health clinics and everything.”
Justice added that the West Virginia model “is not rocket science, it is just about moving and not sitting and planning a strategy.”
Vaccine implantation remains slower than expected, however, in several states in the country. Wisconsin, for example, is lagging behind and has only distributed 42.5% of its doses of the Covid vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Governor Tony Evers called the implementation of the vaccine in the state “a little unstable”. Evers said his state has not received enough vaccines from the federal government and that those who administer them need more time to prepare.
West Virginia administered nearly 12,000 doses, 77% of its dose supply. Justice underscored the importance of putting older Americans at the forefront of a vaccination strategy.
“We looked at it in only one way, and it was age and age, and age, and we knew we had to change,” said Justice. “We didn’t want vaccines on the shelves, we needed them in people’s arms.”
January 2021 is already considered the worst month on record in the United States since the coronavirus pandemic began, with more than 79,000 deaths, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data. It is a dark milestone that surpassed the December record in more than a thousand deaths.