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The real news? Walgreens was there

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Walgreens has inoculated hundreds of thousands of Americans against COVID-19 this year using the vaccine developed by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech. But the pharmacy chain has not been following guidance from federal health officials about the timing of second doses.

— New York Times, April 6, 2021

It has become fashionable of late for the outside world, and various components of that world, to criticize or fault mass retailers, not for a lack of action or initiative but instead for aggressive and well-considered activities designed to alleviate or ameliorate a crisis.

Such was clearly the case with the Times article on April 6. While the story was quick to note that “there is no evidence that separating the doses by an extra week decreases the vaccine’s effectiveness” and acknowledged that, according to the CDC, separating the two doses by up to six weeks is acceptable if necessary, it pointed out that Walgreens had been scheduling the second dose four weeks after the first rather than the three weeks recommended by the agency.

For its part, Walgreens, moving quickly to correct its miscalculation, explained that the four-week interval was chosen because its vaccine-scheduling system by default schedules all second doses four weeks after the first. Using the same gap for both vaccines was “the easiest way to stand up the process based on our capabilities at the time,” according to Walgreens’ chief medical officer, Dr. Kevin Ban.

The Times piece went on to offer the information that “Walgreens is one of the largest among dozens of drug store and grocery store chains that are giving out vaccines allocated by states and via a federal program that the White House said last week would expand to 40,000 locations. Walgreens reported last week that it had given out more than 8 million COVID vaccine doses … and expects to give out 24 million to 34 million before the end of August.”

There you have it. The New York Times, arbiter of all deeds both good and ill-considered, determined to devote 29 paragraphs in its Business section to criticize a mass retailer for shading government guidelines — despite acknowledging that the practice in no way endangered those customers who had chosen to avail themselves of the retailer’s efforts to help alleviate the current pandemic.

The question that emerges is a simple one: Why? Why denigrate a laudable activity even while acknowledging that mass retailers have been in the forefront of providing some relief from a pandemic that has done incalculable damage to society?

The only logical explanation — indeed, the only possible explanation — is that it’s news. The media, once again, has caught a retailer in the shameful act of shading the recommended guidelines by a week even as it strives to ease a situation which has become all but impossible to live with or ignore.

The real news here is about the invaluable service that Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aid and countless other mass retailers are providing on a daily, indeed hourly basis to help Americans fight back against a random killer that neither knows nor cares about whom it attacks — or kills.

Time after time, U.S. retailers have been the first to answer the call when answering that call provides tangible benefits. In the end, the world will little know nor long remember that Walgreens waited an additional week before administering the second shot. Indeed, in the best of all worlds, people will rightly remember that Walgreens was there when being there was a matter of life or death for countless millions of Americans.

For The New York Times, however, and for countless other practitioners of the art and science of journalism, that old bromide still rears it ugly head from time to time: If it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead.


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