Western States Approve Coronavirus Vaccine

A coalition of western states — California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada — approved the new coronavirus vaccine being shipped by by Pfizer and BioNTech on Sunday, allowing the first doses to be distributed across the region.

In October, just before the election, the group of Democrat-governed states echoed New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in his public skepticism of the Trump administration’s vaccine efforts.

The compact among the western states — which was to be an additional layer of review, beyond that of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — appeared to be a political move, not a scientific one.

Nevertheless, with Pfizer shipping the first doses from its Michigan manufacturing facilities, California and the other states did not want to be left behind. As the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday:

The group, representing California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, reviewed the vaccine separately from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which on Friday issued emergency use authorization. The group made its recommendation to the governors of the four states Sunday morning, officials said in a news release.

The move paved the way for vaccines to be distributed across California. Los Angeles International Airport’s Twitter account said Sunday night that the first batch had arrived in L.A., with more to follow this month and in January.

“With shipments of the vaccine soon on their way to California,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement, “we are working hand-in-hand with local public health officials to get the vaccine out to the first phase of recipients.”

When asked by Breitbart News last month, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti made the bizarre claim that an additional layer of bureaucratic review by the western states would make the provision of a vaccine faster, not slower.

Nevertheless, the four states involved do not seem to have been inclined to use their review to stall the distribution of a vaccine that Democrats once said the public ought not to trust on the president’s word alone.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.