Walz Discusses COVID Vaccine Progress, Outreach With President Biden

(KNSI) – On Tuesday, Gov. Tim Walz joined the governors of Utah, Maine, Ohio, New Mexico and Massachusetts on a call with President Joe Biden to talk about the status of COVID-19 vaccinations in those states.

With more than 2.6 million Minnesotans who have now received at least one vaccine dose, Walz touted the state’s high voter turnout and Census participation rates and said the same strategies that get people to the voting booth are also getting shots into arms.

“What we understood was the folks who make those so successful are local, trusted partners,” Walz said. “One of the great success stories is listening to those folks who know how to do it. Here in Minnesota, we have 11 sovereign tribal nations. They did this better than anybody else in the country. They focused on their elders, they focused on multigenerational households and they focused on delivering where people were at.”

Walz said that same model was also employed to reach people who work in food processing plants — places that were hit hard by COVID-19 outbreaks.

“It’s not assuming these people are hesitant, they’re ideologically opposed,” Walz said. “It’s trying to understand where they’re at, what are the differences — some are going to respond differently to different groups.”

Biden agreed with that point, saying sometimes people want a convenient option when they get vaccinated.

“One of the things I’ve found — and I’ve been to an awful lot of vaccinations sites around the country and in my home state — is that it really does get down to, for that person who is allegedly an anti-vaxxer, it gets down in many cases to just convenience,” Biden said.

“Like you’re walking through the gate, ‘Oh yeah, OK, I’m here. Go ahead, now give me a shot. I can do it,'” Biden continued, building on Walz’s example of having Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines available at CHS Field on Tuesday for the St. Paul Saints’ Opening Day.

Walz said to Biden that the early effort to get seniors and other at-risk groups vaccinated this spring showed “real-world consequences” when it came to preventing disease. He brought up the rise in new COVID-19 infections that gained traction in March and April due to the spread of more infectious virus variants.

“But because of the availability of the vaccine, the speed that it had gotten out, we were able to blunt that, and what that meant is hospitals did not become overwhelmed, we did not have to close back down doing many of the things we were doing, and the most important thing is far fewer people died from that,” Walz said.

During the call with the governors, Biden announced that Lyft and Uber will provide free rides to and from vaccination clinics in the U.S. from May 24th to July 4th. Two national tools can also help Americans pinpoint where they can get a vaccine, Biden says: by going to vaccines.gov or texting their ZIP code to 438829.

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