The White House on Tuesday announced the rollout of the Federal Retail Pharmacy Program to distribute one million vaccines per week to Walmart, CVS, Walgreens, and other pharmacy chains starting February 11.
The initiative is designed to help President Joe Biden's campaign promise of administering 100 million shots in 100 days.
Nate Boutte, pharmacy manager for Walgreens, told Cheddar the company is more than ready to distribute any available vaccines across its network of 9,000 stores. "We were literally built for this, so it won't really be a problem per se for us to get our patients into our stores and get them the vaccine as it becomes available," he said.
The annual flu season in particular has prepared the chain for getting jabs into arms on a mass scale. Boutte said the effort will be "very, very similar" to what it does each year.
The chain's footprint will also help it execute quickly on the federal plan. Boutte pointed out that there is a Walgreens within five miles of 80 percent of the U.S. population.
"Walgreens has really always been a leader, especially in getting into underserved communities," he said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention helped select the pharmacy partners by looking at their experience in reaching the populations most vulnerable to COVID-19. The White House has not yet provided details on how the initial phase will be distributed geographically.
Boutte advised viewers to visit walgreens.com/schedulevaccine to determine eligibility and get state-by-state information on when the vaccine will be available.
"We don't want to confuse eligibility with availability. Just because you're eligible we may or may not have the vaccine available at the time," he said. "We're getting it as fast as they're getting it to us."
For the moment, Walgreens only has access to the Moderna vaccine, which requires two doses, but Boutte recognized the potential value of a one-dose vaccine such as those AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson are seeking to distribute.
"Having a vaccine where you can get it in one dose, of course, it would be amazing," he said.
The full list of partnering pharmacies is available here.
Walgreens will receive its first shipment of vaccines on February 12.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
William Falcon, CEO and Founder of Lightning AI, discusses the ongoing feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and how everyday people can use AI in their lives.
U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum “will not go unanswered,” European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen vowed on Tuesday, adding that they will trigger toug
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
