News Room

After months of preparation and scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers, FedEx and UPS’ COVID-19 vaccine distribution mission appears to be going as smoothly as the delivery giants assured it would. “Simply put, a global health crisis of this scale requires a network of our scale to address,” COO Raj Subramaniam said days after the company made its first delivery of Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine. “This is who we are and what we do.” The effort to vaccinate America has encountered slowdowns, however, after FedEx and UPS deliver the shipments to administration sites.

The urgency of vaccinating nursing home residents is evident in the numbers. The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 136,000 residents and employees of long-term care facilities in the U.S. alone, accounting for nearly 40% of all U.S. deaths linked to the disease. Echoing that urgency, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar declared in mid-December, “We can have every nursing home patient vaccinated in the United States by Christmas.” Yet, by Christmas, most states had barely begun. Other states were still far behind when West Virginia became the first state to finish round one of the two-dose vaccine series in nursing homes on Dec. 30.

NBC News' Maura Barrett takes an in-depth look at the Biden administration's plan to increase the rate of Covid-19 vaccine distribution in the U.S.

The urgency of vaccinating nursing home residents is evident in the numbers. The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 136,000 residents and employees of long-term care facilities in the U.S. alone, accounting for nearly 40% of all U.S. deaths linked to the disease. Echoing that urgency, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar declared in mid-December, “We can have every nursing home patient vaccinated in the United States by Christmas.” Yet, by Christmas, most states had barely begun. Other states were still far behind when West Virginia became the first state to finish round one of the two-dose vaccine series in nursing homes on Dec. 30.

CVS and Walgreens have come under fire from local officials for the slow rollout of their vaccinations program to nursing homes. As of January 14, around a quarter of the 4.7 million doses allocated to the companies had been administered CNN reported. TJ Crawford, a spokesperson for CVS, told Insider that the process is going entirely to plan. Both companies told CNN they are on track to have the first round of the two-phase vaccine completed by January 25. But health officials in some states have said that the process has been frustratingly slow.