UW’s Kem Krueger, key figure in county’s vaccination efforts, wins Laramigo Award
Krueger, the dean of UW’s School of Pharmacy, said vaccine delivery was a massive undertaking and required a community-wide effort involving hundreds of volunteers.
The annual Laramigo Award recognizes local residents who have made significant strides in building or maintaining community in Laramie. The award comes with a $10,000 prize provided by an anonymous donor — at least half of which must go to a local nonprofit.
This year’s Laramigo is Kem Krueger, who runs the University of Wyoming’s School of Pharmacy and served as one of the principal organizers of Albany County’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution program.
Of course, Krueger said, he didn’t do it alone.
“It was a tremendous effort by the entire community,” he said. “I’m honored to get the award, don’t get me wrong, but there were many, many people who were deserving.”
Now, two years on from the first vaccines being made available to Laramie residents, Albany County has one of the highest vaccination rates in the state. Krueger said he is proud of the work he and others did to make that happen.
That work was frustrating and even grim at various points during the last three years, but in hindsight, Krueger said it’s inspiring that so many community members came together in a dangerous, uncertain time to protect the community from disease.
“Different people and different groups stepped up at different times when needed,” he said. “There were hundreds of people involved in this effort to keep our county safe. And honestly that made me very proud to live in Albany County.”
Expanding student horizons
A pharmacist by training, Krueger has spent the majority of his career in academia. He moved from Alabama to Wyoming in 2005, taking a faculty position at the University of Wyoming. For more than a decade he taught and conducted research through UW’s School of Pharmacy.
In 2016, he moved onto the administrative side, and in his nine years as dean, Krueger said he has focused on exposing students to “a broad array of career paths and career opportunities.”
“We have, historically, done a good job of developing pharmacists to staff community pharmacies as well as hospital pharmacies,” he said. “That’s what people traditionally think of when they think of pharmacists.”
But Krueger has also worked to develop corporate internships for students with insurance and pharmaceutical companies — two fields that also hire pharmacists. In addition, the school now hosts an online master’s program for working healthcare professionals looking to advance their careers.
Five years ago, Krueger helped establish the Health Equity Leadership Program — a partnership between the rural, mostly white University of Wyoming and the historically black Washington, D.C.-based Howard University.
“Some of the Howard students and the UW students go through a leader academy together, virtually, and then the Howard delegation comes out to look at issues of rural healthcare — and what are those gaps in access and how can pharmacists help fill those gaps?” he said. “And then our students go to D.C. to look at inner city healthcare delivery —and where are some of the gaps and how can pharmacists help fill those gaps?”
Krueger is hesitant to take credit for developments that took the work of so many people.
“I can’t take credit for any of these projects,” he said. “They’re all collaborative efforts.”
In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Krueger got involved in another large, collaborative effort — distributing life-saving vaccines to a community of nearly 40,000 people amid the worst public health crisis of the century.
Delivering the vaccine, from early doses to mass clinics
The University of Wyoming responded to the global pandemic with a series of task forces — to make mask recommendations, to decide when to move classes online, to establish testing protocols and locations, and eventually, to aid local vaccine distribution.
As the first vaccines achieved emergency authorization and health officials set schedules for public delivery, it became clear that distribution would be handled through county health offices and prioritize the groups most at risk for hospitalization or death.
Krueger and the distribution task force offered their services to Albany County Public Health and the first clinic opened Dec. 28, 2020, staffed in part by pharmacy and nursing students authorized to administer vaccines.
“During the early months in January and February, we were getting probably 100 and then 200 doses of vaccine a week,” Krueger recalled. “We operated clinics from Dec. 28 through the middle of March before we wasted a single dose of vaccine. We were able to administer every dose of vaccine that was sent to the county to people in the county.”
By March, just one year after Wyoming’s first recorded infection, it was off to the races.
“Some of the pharmacies in town were able to access more vaccines through separate channels — like through their corporate channels or through their buying groups,” Krueger said. “Pole Mountain was one of those, so in collaboration with Pole Mountain Pharmacy, we ran the first mass vaccine clinic at the (National Guard) Armory.”
And that’s where the majority of Laramie residents seeking vaccines got their jab. Krueger said it was a fitting location for such a historical event, being the same place Laramie residents lined up to get polio vaccines decades before.
When all is said and done
Today, more than 25,000 Albany County residents have gotten at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Nearly 59 percent of the county completed a primary vaccine series (two doses of Moderna or Pfizer or one dose of a single-dose vaccine). Roughly 63 percent of adults in Albany County were fully vaccinated.
There are multiple ways of looking at those numbers, Krueger said.
“Everybody who wanted to be vaccinated at least had access to it,” he said. “And so from that perspective, it was definitely a success. When you look at the percentages — 60-some percent vaccinated is pretty good for Wyoming — but is that sufficient for herd immunity? Well, maybe, maybe not. From that perspective, it was a little bit disappointing.”
But it’s also difficult to look at those numbers as a failure. It’s easy to forget that in June 2020, before the vaccine was fully developed and tested, no one in Albany County was vaccinated. By June 2021, just one year later, nearly half of all adults in the county had made the effort to get fully vaccinated. Vaccinations went up again amid the delta surge of 2021, while well-funded community efforts to promote and reward vaccine uptake continued into 2022.
All the while, rampant misinformation colored electoral campaigns, disrupted school board meetings and killed hundreds of Wyoming residents. Despite widespread access to vaccines, COVID-19 was Wyoming’s third leading cause of death in 2021, behind only heart disease and cancer.
“At that point, I was so cynical — I felt like I was a negative contributor to some of those meetings,” Krueger said. “But in hindsight, this was a cool effort. And I think we did everything possible so that anyone who wanted it could get it.”
The disinformation campaigns and the anger ignited by that disinformation didn’t stop public health efforts. Krueger said new individuals and groups would step up when earlier individuals and groups got burned out.
Retired nurses even stepped into help, offering their years of experience when the county needed them most. That’s another development Krueger is hesitant to take credit for. But David Jones, formerly UW’s Dean of Health Sciences, said it didn’t happen on its own.
“Seeing that the demand for this clinic was growing — and understanding the need for more providers to serve in the clinics — Kem was able to recruit a number of retired nurses from the Laramie community to work the clinics,” Jones said in a UW news release. “Having been involved in the COVID vaccine clinics myself, I was able to witness firsthand Kem’s efforts to get the community vaccine clinic off the ground and to sustain the clinics for months.”
In the same news release, Albany County Public Health Officer Jean Allais also praised Krueger’s leadership.
“He worked tirelessly helping to get our community vaccinated for COVID-19,” she said. “The task was enormous. He worked many hours in any capacity needed at the events themselves, including many evenings and weekends. His enthusiasm for this important endeavor has been unwavering.”
Award and reward
The Laramigo Award for Community Engagement carries a $10,000 cash prize, at least half of which must go to a nonprofit or nonprofits of the award-winner’s choosing. Krueger said his reward will primarily be split between two organizations: Albany County Public Health and Laramie Soup Kitchen.
“Both of those organizations care for the most vulnerable among us and promote public health and build community,” he said.
The remainder will be split between the School of Pharmacy Faculty Development Fund (to support monthly post-COVID community-building events) and buying a generator for tailgating before UW Cowboys games in the fall — in Krueger’s view, a less formal but just as earnest avenue for community-building.
The word “Laramigo” was coined by UW Psychologist Matt Gray some 20 years ago in a letter to the editor of the Laramie Boomerang. Gray has dedicated his professional career to studying sexual violence and assisting survivors of domestic violence. He has co-authored two campus climate surveys monitoring the prevalence of such violence in the campus community.
Fittingly, Gray was the first person to win the Laramigo Award when it launched last year. He split his cash prize between Albany County SAFE Project and the UW Sexual Assault Survivor Emergency Fund.
Gray said he was happy to see this year’s award recognize Krueger’s work.
“There are a good many folks at UW committed to community betterment who are making a real difference in the lives of fellow citizens,” Gray said. “Historically, there's been a misperception that all or even most faculty are hunkered down in classrooms and laboratories without meaningful connectivity to the broader community. While that's probably true for some, it's not true for most. So I'm heartened to see that UW administration and donors are recognizing these efforts.”
Thank you Kem!!! I didn't realize the armory was the same place the polio vaccine was administered. Very cool.