Executives from major US corporations are eagerly raising their hands at the front of class hoping to get called on by President Biden. The problem they think they can answer? How to speed up a vaccine rollout that is wayyyy behind schedule.
- New York State was set to run out of vaccine doses yesterday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. And just 67% of hospital staff (who are in the first priority tier) have received shots.
- Elsewhere in the country, about half of the 38 million doses distributed to states are stuck in freezers.
A few notable hand-raisers
Walmart, which is already vaccinating healthcare workers in Arkansas and New Mexico, is expanding its vaccine efforts to seven additional states, Chicago, and Puerto Rico. Eventually, the nation’s largest retailer thinks it can dole out 10 million to 13 million doses a month.
Over in Washington state, Starbucks, Microsoft, and Costco have all been tapped by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to help distribute vaccines. And this week, Amazon implored the Biden administration to call upon its expertise for something a little more pressing than delivering a Ninja food processor in less than 12 hours.
Private sector 
public sector
Big retailers, working more closely with local governments, could be a missing link in the distribution effort’s 10,000-piece puzzle. “Their core businesses are already geared around serving millions of customers day in and day out. They have locations right across the country and...national distribution and logistics networks,” Neil Saunders, managing director of Global Data Retail, told the Washington Post.
It’s not just the big kids helping out, either. Carbon Health, a healthcare startup that just finished raising a Series C round, now powers the back-end tech for the City of Los Angeles’s entire vaccine program.
Zoom out: The private sector has every incentive to help out the government. “Our economy will not recover, and we won’t be able to get people back into the office, until we have good penetration of the vaccines,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said.
