West Virginia governor says everyone over 65 could be vaccinated before Valentine’s Day



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West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice praised the successful distribution of the coronavirus vaccine in his state and said that while Mountain State had the “doses by Valentine’s Day, every person in this state, aged 65 and over, would be vaccinated ”.

West Virginia has spent the past three weeks as the nation’s first or second state for per capita 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 on Wednesday’s Table. West Virginia Covid-19 board.

Justice canceled his state’s “all-inclusive” approach to the distribution of 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,” Justice said in an interview Wednesday evening. “We brought our National Guard, our local pharmacies, our local health professionals and our local health clinics and everything.”

Justice added that the West Virginia model “isn’t rocket science, it’s just about moving, not sitting down and planning a strategy.”

However, vaccine deployment remains slower than expected in several states across the country. Wisconsin, for example, lags behind and has only distributed 42.5% of its doses of the Covid vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gov. Tony Evers called the state’s vaccine rollout “a little bumpy.” Evers said his state had not received enough vaccines from the federal government and those administering vaccines needed more time to prepare.

West Virginia administered nearly 12,000 doses, 77% of their dose supply. Justice has stressed the importance of putting older Americans at the forefront of a vaccination strategy.

“We only looked at it one way, and that was age, age, and age, and we knew we had to move,” Justice said. “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 United States since the start of the coronavirus pandemic with more than 79,000 deaths, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data. This marks a grim milestone that surpassed December’s record of more than a thousand deaths.

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