WMT Walmart Inc

By Sarah Nassauer | Photographs by Ryan David Brown for The Wall Street Journal 

Skowhegan, Maine--Pat and John Thomas were watching the news one night last week when they saw that Walmart in this central Maine town of 8,000 people was taking appointments for the Covid-19 vaccination. They had signed up for shots at a hospital about a month ago but still hadn't heard back. Ms. Thomas, a 74-year-old retiree, jumped on the computer.

On Friday the couple got the Skowhegan Walmart's first doses under a new federal government program that provides Covid-19 vaccines directly to retail pharmacies across the country.

"We'll be able to see our family and friends," said Ms. Thomas, a former assistant manager at a bank who has been married to her husband, a 78-year-old retired accountant, for 48 years. "It will just be nice to be able to visit and go somewhere when you're not afraid."

Walmart Inc., the U.S.'s largest retailer and private employer, is set to become one of the biggest distributors of the Covid-19 vaccine as the federal government enlists retail pharmacies to accelerate what has been a choppy rollout.

Last week, 21 retail chains and pharmacy networks started administering those doses, including CVS, Walgreens, Kroger and grocers in all 50 states. The government initially plans to give around a million doses a week directly to pharmacies. Around 200,000 of those are going to Walmart, a spokeswoman said.

That is in part because out of the roughly 5,000 U.S. stores under the company's Walmart and Sam's Club banners, about 4,000 are located in what the federal government defines as medically underserved areas.

"We have the most dispersed population of any state in the country," Maine Gov. Janet Mills said, as well as the oldest population of any state in the country.

Ms. Mills, a Democrat who took office in early 2019, said she chose to work only with Walmart to start because stores are well spread out and the chain was poised to roll out the vaccine quickly. "There are other chains, chain grocery stores and whatnot but they were not ready yet with respect to electronic medical records and being able to coordinate information with the state," said Ms. Mills.

At the Skowhegan Walmart on Friday, around two dozen people had vaccine appointments. Some said they couldn't wait to get their shots, while others said they were nervous about taking a new vaccine that was developed so quickly but feared Covid-19 even more.

"I'm on the fence," said Betty Kuhn, a 76-year-old who lives in Hartland, Maine, who came to the pharmacy counter to check that her Monday vaccine appointment was in the system. "But at my age, my family wants me to get it."

The vaccine started to arrive last Wednesday in refrigerated boxes that tell pharmacists if doses have been at the correct temperature during transit, said Robin Nicol, pharmacy manager at the store. The local news had already informed many that Walmart would be taking appointments. Walmart's booking website crashed in Maine and other locations across the country. A spokeswoman for the retailer said it is now running smoothly.

Last week, Maine received about 4,800 doses from the federal government that went only to Walmart. That worked out to around 200 doses in each of Walmart's 24 stores in the state with pharmacies, enough for a few dozen vaccine appointments each day per store. "Demand is massive," Mr. Nicol said. When the website crashed, interested patients called or came to the store to ask about availability, he said.

The store did a trial run the day before the official launch, calling 10 patients in for vaccinations from the store's "waste protocol list," which the store maintains in case any doses are left over, Mr. Nicol said.

The Skowhegan pharmacy serves a steady stream of customers, some driving as much as 90 minutes from the more remote north for prescriptions or other services, store workers said.

"I live at the top of a mountain so I come when I'm absolutely out of everything and I get one of everything," said Gloria Guerette, a 78-year-old piling her cart with cooking oil, meat and frozen vegetables. She said she hasn't tried to get a vaccine appointment yet, because they require two shots. "I hope I can get one shot so I only have to travel once," she said.

"We have areas of our county that would be designated as frontier really, " said Matt L'Italien, director of Somerset Public Health, a community health group at Redington-Fairview General Hospital in Skowhegan. "There is not enough access to primary-care physicians, dentists, all those services," he said.

After the state moved on from vaccinating front-line healthcare workers to citizens 70 and older, supply at Redington-Fairview became constrained, said Lisa Caswell, director of pharmacy at the hospital. More than 5,000 people have preregistered on the hospital's website since Jan. 20, she said, and more than 1,000 have called to join the wait list. The hospital had 300 first doses to give out last week, 200 this week, said Ms. Caswell.

Dawn Wing, a 70-year-old from nearby Madison, came to the Skowhegan Walmart pharmacy counter Friday to try to score an appointment, after she called three regional hospitals and tried to book online at Walmart's website with no luck. "I have high blood pressure issues and my husband has had colon cancer," she said. "I'm ready to pull my hair out."

Each Maine Walmart store is preparing to administer about 400 doses a week starting a month from now to provide second doses as federal supplies increase, said Chad Tozier, health and wellness director for an 11-store region, including Skowhegan. Walmart plans to host clinics, moving shelves of products to make room for more appointments and the waiting areas required so pharmacists can monitor patients for allergic reactions, he said. For now, patients sit behind a movable blue 5-foot barrier near the pharmacy to get the vaccine.

The government gives Walmart and other retail pharmacies the vaccine free and there is no charge to shoppers. Walmart can earn a small fee from insurance companies when patients are covered, but is largely shouldering the cost to administer the vaccine, said Lisa Smith, senior director of health and wellness at Walmart.

Walmart is likely to benefit in other ways. Many of the people getting the vaccine at the Skowhegan store Friday didn't previously have patient profiles in Walmart's system, said Mr. Tozier. "We are making relationships with new patients," he said.

Ann Jackson and her husband, Norman Jackson, 73 and 76 years old respectively, arrived for their vaccine appointment midmorning after waiting for weeks to get an appointment at the local hospital, said Ms. Jackson. Later, she added chips, bananas and T-shirts to her cart. "You never want to waste the trip to Walmart," she said.

Write to Sarah Nassauer at sarah.nassauer@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 14, 2021 05:44 ET (10:44 GMT)

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