The people who are among the most vulnerable to COVID-19 are likely the only ones who got Gov. Jim Justice’s “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” reference Monday.
“You don’t want to be the dumb bunny here,” he said.
The governor was giving a nod to a running bit from the landmark 1960s TV comedy show — but he wasn’t smiling.
That’s because of the deadly serious implications, he said, for any West Virginian aged 65 or older who chooses not to take the coronavirus vaccine.
“You know,” he said, “this hesitancy to take the vaccine — or stubbornness, or whatever you want to call it — is going to lead to just a lot of people that aren’t taking the vaccine that are going to die.”
The first allotment of the Pfizer shipment is already here and mostly administered, Justice said, and the Moderna vaccine was set to arrive Monday, the same day of the briefing.
All told, the Mountain State should receive more than 44,000 vaccines this week, the governor reported.
Just in time, Justice said.
Between the time of his briefing last Friday, and his audience with the press Monday, the coronavirus claimed the lives of 38 more West Virginians, bringing the pandemic death count here to 1,129.
The state notched another 995 positive cases over the past 24 hours, the state Department of Health and Human Services said.
On the County Alert Map maintained by the DHHR, 32 of the West Virginia’s 55 counties, including Monongalia, are showing red — which is the worst designation for the virus.
Another 14 more are orange, the second-worst hue for COVID on the map. Randolph County is the only county in the state at green, the best, safest rating.
However, he said, West Virginia is also No. 1 in the nation at getting the vaccines into the arms of the people who need it most right now.
Justice said the state has administered some 15,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine in long-term nursing facilities across the state.
That’s a rate of better than 90%, he said, and that means those critical first doses — the Pfizer vaccine requires two — could be finished up by next Monday, three days after Christmas.
“We may be finishing our vaccines to long-term care facilities before the other states even start,” the governor said.
After that, he said, it will be a matter of getting the doses to everyone else.
That’s where Dr. Steven Stefancic comes in.
Stefancic, who is medical director of the Mercer County Health Department, was a guest at the briefing Monday.
As a Mercer County native, he said he’s fully aware of the locales in West Virginia that are rural and rugged.
The director said his department is launching mobile inoculation units so residents of even the most remote hollows of his region will have a fighting chance against COVID.
“We want to make access available to the people,” he said.
Stefancic said his department is partnering with other medical agencies so the mobile units can be staffed with ambulances and outfitted with emergency medications — should someone suffer an allergic reaction to the shot.
