Walmart Has Spent the Past Year Preparing with CDC and Others to Administer COVID-19 Vaccine
27 Gennaio 2021 - 4:20PM
Business Wire
Earlier today, Lisa Smith, Senior Director of Health and
Wellness at Walmart, released the following article:
This press release features multimedia. View
the full release here:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210127005641/en/
Member in Greenville, South Carolina,
Sam’s Club receives her first vaccination shot. (Photo: Business
Wire)
“As we prepare this week to begin administering COVID-19
vaccines in Maryland, Texas, Delaware, Indiana and the District of
Columbia to eligible populations as determined by each district and
state, we know our pharmacists and pharmacy technicians are ready.
It has been a year of hard work and preparation to get to this
point. And as more people become eligible for vaccination, it’s a
good time to take a look back at how we got here.
I’m on the clinical team with Dr. Tom Van Gilder, our chief
medical officer, and last year, as soon as we heard about the speed
at which COVID-19 was spreading toward the United States, we
started planning immediately. And when we learned the viral
sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was discovered in January of 2020, we knew
at that point researchers could start working on a vaccine.
So, for a little over a year, we’ve been learning, planning and
educating ourselves and our health care professionals on what a
vaccine rollout could look like. The good news was we were already
in a strong position.
Over the last few years, vaccines have become a significant part
of how our pharmacies provide service to their communities.
Administering vaccines for things like influenza and tetanus have
become routine for our pharmacists and, in some states, pharmacy
technicians. We felt good about that, but we also felt like we owed
it to our customers and communities to be ready for a COVID-19
vaccine as soon as possible. And at the time, we didn’t know how
quickly a vaccine would be available.
Over the summer of 2020, planning really began to pick up. We
had our first calls with the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) and Health and Human Services (HHS). We pulled
together multidisciplinary teams from all over our organizations.
We knew it would take everyone from store operations and clinical
support to data and analytics to think about the best ways to
tackle this large-scale vaccine rollout.
As a result, right now we have over 5,000 Walmart store and
Sam’s Club locations that are operationally and clinically ready to
administer vaccines in our facilities and in communities through
vaccination events.
But the work didn’t stop at simply being operationally
ready.
Walmart is in a number of communities where it’s difficult to
access health care. As we work with state and local officials,
we’re using the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and other tools to
be thoughtful and purposeful in cases of limited vaccine
allocation, so we can have the best impact possible.
And we’ve ramped up education and clinical training, so our
customers and associates feel confident about getting the vaccine
as early as they’re eligible. Our Pharmacy staff in stores and
clubs already have extensive clinical training, but we’ve put a
large focus on vaccine hesitancy training and educating our
associates about the vaccine. We want to make sure everyone has the
most accurate and up-to-date information to make the best health
decisions for themselves and their families.
That’s really why I got into health care in the first place -
for moments like this. This is a once-in-a-career moment to help
people get back to doing what they love and, more importantly,
being with those they love.
We’re already hearing great feedback from our patients in
locations where we’re administering vaccines according to state
eligibility, like our Sam’s Club in Greenville, South Carolina.
It’s exciting to see the gratitude and the optimism these patients
have as they get vaccinated. We can’t wait until more people across
the country have the opportunity to receive the COVID-19 vaccine
once their state has the allocation and determines eligibility to
broader groups of people.
It's taken a lot of preparation to get to where we are, and our
pharmacists are ready and excited to get started taking the fight
to COVID-19 by administering vaccines. We are all in this
together.”
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210127005641/en/
Marilee McInnis - 800-331-0085
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