A few months ago, we celebrated West Virginia’s status as a leader in the United States’ Covid-19 vaccine rollout. We were excited for the state—often an unnecessary butt of jokes—and found their results hopeful.
Since then, things haven’t gone great.
West Virginia is now among the ten states with the lowest rate of residents who’ve received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.
As governor Jim Justice said yesterday, West Virginia has hit the wall—the wall at which everyone who’s eligible for vaccination and wants a vaccine has received at least one dose. Unfortunately for the state, their wall is further from target vaccination rates than those in many other states (though they’re still ahead of a few—the point of this is not to pick on West Virginia).
The state is, like many, trying out different approaches to get shots in arms, and the upcoming hoped-for expansion of eligibility to include children aged twelve to fifteen should provide a jolt in West Virginia, just as it will elsewhere. Still, one would assume—with West Virginia not having a particularly young population—that their “vaccine wall” with teens will be proportionally close to where it’s been with adults. This isn’t great.
At the same time, though, our praise from February still stands. It’s still impressive that West Virginia reached the mark it had, at that point, as quickly as it did. Reaching that mark so quickly undoubtedly saved lives, and it appears that few in West Virginia had to wait very long for a vaccine that they wanted. Hopefully resistance lessens in West Virginia, just as hopefully it lessens around the country. But at least the state—which has one of the highest poverty rates in the country—did so much so early.
