In order to increase the slow pace of administration of Covid-19 vaccines, Washington Governor Jay Inslee said on Monday that the state had turned to Starbucks to help simplify 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, adding that the number of employees could change.
Inslee said the state is also seeing more than 2,000 pharmacies administer the vaccines and open vaccination sites. Microsoft, another Seattle-based company, will also create a website for 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 achieved levels of production that no one could have imagined because we set ambitious goals.”
The two vaccines approved for use in the United States, which require two injections, are remarkably effective, but the nationwide rollout has been slow since it came out a month ago. Across the country, 12.2 million people received one dose of one of the 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.
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“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 how difficult it would be to vaccinate all health workers quickly before moving on to other populations and that fewer people signed up for vaccination than expected.
“We are facing the same challenges that all states have faced, because we start with the most difficult part of it – which is a very small group, which are health workers,” he said. “And to identify them and vector them on the websites – this has been a slower part of the process. Now we are going to start opening this today to people over 65 years old. It is much easier to communicate and coordinate this group to put them in. “
Starbucks started discussions with the state earlier this month. Only 31,581 people received both doses in Washington, which has a population of 7.6 million, according to CDC data. 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 simulation modeling system to find ways to streamline vaccines, according to the state and the company. Starbucks 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 vaccination 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. West Virginia vaccinated more residents per capita than any other state, working with small independent pharmacies instead of large chains.
Several Democratic governors, including Inslee, said last week that the Trump administration had misled them about whether a national stockpile of vaccines was being maintained for second doses. Inslee said the federal government told governors that there was a strategic reserve.
Inslee said he is very confident that the Biden government will do a better job of distributing vaccines to states.
“I am confident that we will have a much better relationship, that the federal government will not knowingly deceive us like the last government did,” he said. “And so I feel very good about the progress of our federal partnership.”
CORRECTION (January 19, 2021, 6 pm Eastern Time): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated where Microsoft Corp. is headquartered. It is based in Redmond, Washington, not Seattle.