Honeywell teams with North Carolina businesses to help accelerate Covid vaccine rollout

Charlotte, North Carolina-based Honeywell announced Thursday that it’s partnered with a consortium of local businesses to help accelerate the state’s Covid-19 vaccine rollout.

The partnership with Atrium Health, Tepper Sports & Entertainment and the Charlotte Motor Speedway plans to set up mass vaccination sites across the state with the goal of helping the state administer 1 million shots by July 4. Bank of America Stadium, which is home to the Carolina Panthers, and the Charlotte Motor Speedway will be among the vaccination sites, the group said.

“The pharma companies did a great job bringing us these vaccines, and we really need to get them into people’s arms as quickly as we possibly can,” Honeywell CEO Darius Adamczyk said in a “Mad Money” interview. He added that the group has the support of North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.

Adamczyk told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that he acknowledges the herculean task of swiftly distributing the vaccine and getting it into people’s arms.

“I don’t think any one entity has all the skill sets to do this, whether it’s the states, whether it’s medical companies, whether it’s stadium owners,” he said. “Frankly, I felt that Honeywell as a fairly complex company that has a lot of tentacles all over the world and operates a lot of manufacturing, we could help in it, lend our expertise.”

The vaccine rollout has so far been slower than expected. Federal officials had aimed to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of December and an additional 30 million people by the end of January. More than 30.6 million doses have been distributed to states, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but just over 11.1 million have actually been administered.

In North Carolina, more than 268,000 doses have been administered, according to the CDC. The state has a population of about 10.5 million, according to the Census Bureau.

Adamczyk said Thursday he hopes to get the mass vaccination sites in North Carolina up and running to speed up the rollout and to provide a model for other states on how businesses can get involved with the vaccination effort.