Overlake Medical Center: Hospital apologizes after inviting donors to sign up for Covid-19 vaccine

“We are pleased to share that we have 500 new open appointments at the Overlake COVID-19 vaccine clinic,” said an email from an Overlake Medical Center, which also included a special access code to register.

Overlake sent the email to approximately 4,000 members of his community “including volunteers, retired nurses and doctors, all employees and approximately 100 donors from our Foundation database,” said a statement from the hospital.

As of Jan. 22, Washington has been in Phase 1B, Tier 1 of distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine, according to the state health department website. This means that all people over 65 years old and people over 50 in multi-generation households are eligible for vaccination.

Gov. Jay Inslee expressed concern about the emails at a news conference Tuesday.

“In fact, if they preferred some VIP list, that’s not the way to do it,” he said. ‘That is not acceptable to us. We must give everyone a fair chance on the vaccine. ‘

Hospital officials said in the statement they understand an error has been made. “We recognize that we made a mistake in including a subset of our donors and by not pursuing a broader outreach strategy to fulfill these commitments, and we apologize,” the statement said.

The hospital’s statement noted that people who received the invitations could only apply if they were legally eligible to receive the vaccine under current Washington state policy.

“Our intention and commitment has always been to safely, appropriately and efficiently administer every vaccine made available to us,” the hospital said.

The hospital’s statement also said it had administered 11,000 vaccines to date and “will soon be administering vaccines to more than 40,000 community members who have upcoming appointments scheduled through our online system.”