Overlake Medical Center: hospital apologizes after inviting donors to register for Covid-19 vaccine

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

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

As of January 22, Washington was in phase 1B level 1 of the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine, according to the state department of health website. This means that all people over 65 and those over 50 living in multigenerational households are eligible for vaccination.

Gov. Jay Inslee expressed his concern over the emails at a press conference on Tuesday.

“If, in fact, they were giving preference to a VIP list, that is not the way to do it,” he said. “It is not acceptable to us. We have to give everyone a chance to get the vaccine.”

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

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

“Our intention and commitment has always been to administer every vaccine available to us safely, appropriately and effectively,” the hospital said.

The hospital statement also said it had administered 11,000 vaccines to date and “will soon be administering vaccines to over 40,000 community members who have upcoming appointments scheduled through our online system. “