West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice praised the success of distributing his state’s coronavirus vaccine and said that if Mountain State had the “doses for Valentine’s Day, all people in this state, over the age of 65, would be vaccinated. ”
West Virginia has spent the past three weeks as the nation’s number one or number two state for per capita-administered vaccine doses, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 vaccination tracker. The state also has a first-dose administration rate of 95.2% and a second-dose vaccination rate of 46.8%, according to vaccine data released Wednesday on Virginia’s Covid-19 control panel. Western.
Justice broke his state’s “all-in” approach to distributing the Covid vaccine on CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith”
“We didn’t necessarily take the federal approach, we took a practical approach, and we took a holistic approach,” Justice said during an interview Wednesday evening. “We brought in our National Guard, our local pharmacies, our local health professionals and our local health clinics and everything.”
Justice added that the West Virginia model “is not a rocket science, it’s just about moving and not falling behind and planning a strategy.”
However, vaccine deployment remains slower than expected in several states across the country. Wisconsin, for example, has lagged behind and has only distributed 42.5% of its Covid vaccine doses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gov. Tony Evers called the state’s launch of vaccines “a little bumpy.” Evers said his state did not receive enough vaccines from the federal government and those who administered vaccines needed more time to prepare.
West Virginia has administered about 12,000 doses, 77% of the dose supply. Justice stressed the importance of placing older Americans at the forefront of a vaccination strategy.
“We looked at this in one way, it was age, age and age, and we knew we had to move,” Justice said. “We didn’t want vaccines sitting on a shelf, we needed them in people’s arms.”
January 2021 is already the worst month in the United States since the coronavirus pandemic began with more than 79,000 deaths, according to a CNBC analysis of data from Johns Hopkins. It marks a cruel milestone that surpassed the December record in more than a thousand deaths.