Originally published at: You could soon get your COVID-19 vaccine at the dollar store | Boing Boing
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Don’t get me wrong, I will get a covid vaccine anywhere, anytime but am I the only one who finds it disheartening how much our government is relying on corporations to administer vaccines? I know rural areas don’t have a lot of access to pharmacies but don’t they have local government that presumably have some sort of building that could be used to administer vaccines? Again, this isn’t bad news but I want to live in a world where I can get a vaccine in a place that doesn’t sell candy bars.
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You sound like some kind of pinko commie f$gg#t spewing that kind of socialist “the government can do things without causing a holodomor” bullshit.
/sarc
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I can believe that there’s Dollar Stores (and their similar competitors) in rural areas. Through my work i’ve helped them get gas to rural locations. I do think that the logistics of this might be more involved than you’d expect, so i don’t know if this is a good idea or not but making the assumption that they can handle the complexity of shipping, refrigeration, scheduling and handling people in a safe way then i’m all for getting the vaccine in more people. But that’s a lot of ifs and i don’t have the kind of experience to really have much of an informed opinion.
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Sort of but i think that the physical location is just a small piece. It doesn’t address the overall logistics of shipping, storing and refrigerating everything. Which these stores can hopefully do
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I grew up in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania, like 10 miles from the nearest red light kind of stuff. For the last 38 years the only commerce of any kind near my parents’ house were roadside farm stands (often the kind that operate on the honor system). A couple years ago they put up a Dollar General less than a mile from my parents’ home where a corn field once stood. Going into it for the first time was a trippy experience. But, my parents enjoy not having to drive 10 miles to get a loaf of bread, so that’s good.
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Very true. I suppose I imagine the government like it is in the outbreak movies where they mobilize their dedicated stand-by teams to go out into the hinterlands and save the world…but alas, those are movies.
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That could be an amazingly effective way to get the vaccine to a lot of people without health care who may be wary of going to a pharmacy and unable to go to a doctor, especially if they have the infrastructure in place that would get this set up easily.
And only slightly off topic, but Dollar General, like Family Dollar, is a discount store and not a dollar store. Not considerably crucial information to the matter at hand, but it’s good to be precise whenever possible 
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The more locations the better. And I am sure there are many counties with more than one Dollar Tree but only one central hospital/government center. I assume they can figure out the logistics of cold storage, but this seems an unalloyed good to me.
Also, CVS was seamless. Got there 10 minutes ahead of our appointment, we’re checked in, and were back out the door <30 minutes after our appointment time, including the 15 minute hang-out-for-awhile waiting period. Not sure what time commitments people are needing at Oakland Coliseum, but CVS had this locked in. Also, why wouldn’t you want the convenience of picking up a half rack of Trumer Pils on the way out the door?
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Ok, but how much does it cost?
Around the South, Dollar General is referred to as “The Mall” in rural neighborhoods; it’s all they’ve got for miles around. That includes doctors, pharmacies, etc. Probably the only thing almost as common is a feed/farm store. Which does store medications for farm animals.
Probably the hardest thing of all of this is trusting your local Dollar Store is going to be 100% on the level about freezer temps, timing of having the doses thawed/shot, and of course you still need someone to administer the shots. If they sent military medics or semi-local pharmacists to each small community to oversee, it’d be decent.
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“But shit, it was ninety-nine cents!”
(sorry)
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I know what you’re saying, but the upside is that they need some temporary space and it’s nice to negotiate once instead of for every parcel. The other really nice thing is people already know where their local store is instead of trying to publish a list of addresses that might be subject to change. Schools would be another possibility and are often used for voting locations, but negotiating is still less centralized and for people who didn’t grow up around there, they might not know where they are (and hopefully schools will be in use very soon).
It’s a nice contrast to something like Publix, which is not in the most affected neighborhoods.
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At this point I’d get the jab from a leper. I ain’t go’n to be picky.
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I’d trust Tractor Supply with vaccine distribution.
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$1.01, because they’re greedy.
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I wish that were the case, but local governments, especially in rural areas of red states have been just gutted since the 70s. Often, they just do not have any meaningful infrastructure left to handle something like this. I agree that it should be otherwise.
To be fair, most chain pharmacies have a pretty big candy aisle these days.
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True. My initial thoughts on this reliance on corporations for vaccine administration began when some states seemed to just give the entire project over to Walgreens and CVS. It all just feels a bit too Idiocracy to me but then again almost everything these days does and in the end if our corporate overlords can get us all vaccinated and back to mindless consumption quicker and easier then it is what it is.
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