West Virginia government Jim Justice praised the success of his state’s distribution of the coronavirus vaccine, claiming that if the Mountain State had the “doses by Valentine’s Day, every person in this state, 65 and older, would be vaccinated.”
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 Vaccination Tracker, West Virginia has been ranked number one or number two in the nation for vaccine doses delivered per capita for the past three weeks. The state also boasts a first dose delivery rate of 95.2% and a second dose vaccination rate of 46.8%, according to vaccination data posted on West Virginia’s Covid-19 dashboard Wednesday.
Justice broke his state’s “all-in” approach to spreading 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 comprehensive approach,” said Justice during a Wednesday evening interview. “We brought our National Guard, our local pharmacies, our local healthcare people and our local health clinics and everything.”
Justice added that the West Virginia model “is not rocket science, this is just about moving and not sitting back and planning a strategy.”
However, vaccine roll-out continues to be slower than expected in several states in the country. Wisconsin, for example, is lagging behind, having distributed only 42.5% of its Covid vaccine doses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gov. Tony Evers called the state’s vaccine rollout “a bit bumpy”. Evers said his state was not receiving enough vaccines from the federal government and those administering vaccines needed more time to prepare.
West Virginia has administered nearly 12,000 doses, 77% of their dose supply. Justice underscored the importance of placing older Americans at the forefront of a vaccination strategy.
“We only looked at this one way, and it was age and age, and age, and we knew we had to move,” said Justice. “We didn’t want vaccines on a shelf, we needed them in people’s arms.”
January 2021 is already the worst month on record in the US since the coronavirus pandemic began with more than 79,000 fatalities, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data. It marks a stark milestone that surpassed December’s record of more than a thousand deaths.