RIDGEFIELD, Wash. — Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and state Secretary of Health Umair Shah toured the mass COVID-19 vaccination site at the Clark County Fairgrounds in Ridgefield on Thursday morning.
The site is administering more than 700 vaccinations per day, Inslee said, and is one of four mass vaccination sites in the state.
Inslee and Shah toured the vaccination site starting around 8:30 a.m. and spoke to the media after.
"I couldn't be more delighted," Inslee said after the tour. "And what I've seen is the production, they can do this almost one every four minutes, which to me is astonishingly quickly. They've used the [National] Guard to do the logistical work so the person is prepared when they get there to be vaccinated. And they're getting better every day."
Inslee said Washingtonians should be encouraged by the progress the state has made. He said in the past week, the state has gone from vaccinating about 13,000 per day to nearly 40,000 per day.
"We are on the path to success and I couldn't be more excited about it," Inslee said.
The governor mentioned that the state still has limited doses. He said he's excited that President Joe Biden has announced the order of hundreds of millions more doses. Washington state has secured a 16% increase in its doses for the next few weeks, Inslee said.
"Having doses is ultimately the salvation of this," Inslee said. "We want to get as many doses as fast as we can. We've shown success and I'm very, very happy about it."
Inslee encouraged people to continue to wear masks and practice social distancing while they wait their turn for a vaccine. He also said people should be careful and avoid large Super Bowl parties.
"The vaccine is a miracle, it really is, a vaccine within a year, it's just a miracle," he said. "But even after we get vaccinated, we need to be careful. We need to continue to wear masks, we need to continue to socially distance even after we're vaccinated. We don't have confidence yet that you're not a transmitter even after you've been vaccinated. So we are staying in this game for some period of time."