Washington Governor Jay Inslee has teamed up with Starbucks to more effectively distribute vaccines within the state. The Washington-based company will help state officials with the logistics of distributing the vaccine. Starbucks has also assigned 11 full-time employees with expertise in deployment, operations, research and development. Through this new partnership, Inslee hopes to distribute as many as 45,000 doses per day.
Inslee has also partnered with Microsoft to help distribute COVID-19 vaccines. The tech company will set up a drive-by site that will provide up to 5,000 COVID-19 vaccinations per day. The governor is also working with pharmacies to provide vaccines to residents.
“This is a unique challenge for the United States and in every state to stand up a total mobilization of our resources,” Inslee said.
“We did that in World War II when we built the Liberty ships here in Washington State. We reached production levels that no one could imagine because we set ambitious goals.”
Despite vaccines being distributed each day, the United States has only administered 13.8 vaccines thus far. Of those 13.8 million, less than 2 million people have received both doses needed for the complete vaccination.
“We can’t think that’s an acceptable pace,” Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson said.
“So we have to dramatically scale this up and accelerate the progress.”
