WASHINGTON – With an urgent need to quickly organize mass COVID-19 vaccinations, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Friday said members of the Illinois National Guard may actually be administering the shots.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker also said in his daily briefing Friday that the Illinois National Guard will be deployed to set up a total of six mass vaccination sites in Cook County with 25 smaller sites in high-demand areas.
As more vaccination centers are developed, and more people trained to give shots, the crucial part for Illinois is to obtain, on a giant scale, far more doses than it has so far. Durbin said that 1.2 million doses have been shipped, with 570,000 shots given. The remainder is being held back for the necessary second dose. There are about 13 million people in Illinois.
More details on the Illinois National Guard mobilization for vaccine administration — and specific duties — emerged in a call Durbin had with Illinois reporters from his Capitol office.
At least 267 members of the Illinois National Guard were sent to Washington as part of the 25,000 troops sent to provide security for the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump supporters.
Durbin said, “my friends in the National Guard, who came out here, told me that they were getting prepared to be part of the effort to vaccinate the people in our state. I don’t know any details on what they have in mind, but if they have competent people who can administer these injections, we can certainly use them.”
He added later in the interview, “some of the guardsmen said that they were going to be involved in vaccinations, Moving forward, that was news to me, that’s good news because if they’re trained to administer the injections that can be really helpful to us.”
The Army on Jan. 14 announced that Illinois was one of 16 states and territories that would be using guard soldiers and airmen to “administer COVID-19 vaccines to public health workers, nursing staff and residents, and other high-risk people.”
Ramping up production of the COVID vaccines and getting the the vaccines shots into more arms is a priority of the Biden administration, which plans to invoke the Defense Production Act to help get the job done.
Biden has pledged to administer 100 million shots in the first 100 days and hire more public health workers.
On Thursday, the day after his inauguration, Biden signed a series of executive orders increasing the production of vaccines and PPE and to install a national distribution strategy.
