Three members of Congress from Northern Virginia have asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to create a mass covid vaccination site in the Washington suburbs.
Representatives Gerald Connolly, Don Beyer, and Jennifer Wexton, who are all Democrats, sent a joint letter Tuesday to Robert Fenton, FEMA’s acting administrator, requesting that Northern Virginia be selected as the location of one of the 100 community mass vaccination sites that the Biden administration has proposed creating throughout the country as part of its effort to combat the covid pandemic.
“Our localities are eager and ready, and they have the capability to vaccinate thousands more people than they currently have vaccine supply for,” the lawmakers wrote. “For example, Arlington County is receiving roughly 2,700 doses per week but has the capacity to do at least 1,000 per day. Staffing is not the limiting factor, supply is.”
The politicians also said that Northern Virginia has a particularly high demand for Covid vaccines. “Arlington County is the jurisdiction with the highest percent of individuals willing to be vaccinated across the country, at 92%, followed closely by its neighboring jurisdictions in Northern Virginia,” they said in their letter.
Aaron Fritschner, the communications director for Representative Beyer, says the lawmakers don’t have a specific place in mind for the possible site. Should the federal government chose to establish such a mass vaccination site in Northern Virginia, it would be up to FEMA—not the lawmakers—to determine its location, Fritschner says.
Luke Mullins is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine focusing on the people and institutions that control the city’s levers of power. He has written about the Koch Brothers’ attempt to take over The Cato Institute, David Gregory’s ouster as moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, the collapse of Washington’s Metro system, and the conflict that split apart the founders of Politico.
