Mass vaccine sites in eight Alabama cities collectively gave more than 76,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines as the state wanted to deliver them.
But some of the sites may not open at all next week, or will work at a lower capacity than they did this week.
The Alabama Health Officer, dr. Scott Harris, said Friday that the state does not receive enough doses each week to provide the transit clinics at the same rates, and that some of the sites prefer not to run the transit clinics next week.
“It is clear that this is a successful model. We would like to continue to do so,” Harris said in a media call on Friday. “But at the moment we do not have the ability to continue this week after week.”
Many of the drive-through sites are designed to be part of a weekly boom and will not be open every week. Some, such as the three locations in the Birmingham area operated by UAB, will remain open with the help of the allocation of the vaccine supply from UAB Hospital.
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Harris said the state receives between 60,000 and 70,000 first-dose shots per week, about 30,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine and 40,000 Modner vaccine. The transit clinics gave more first doses this week than the state receives on average each week.
Harris said the state essentially used the entire stockpile of Pfizer vaccine it received last week to supply the transit clinics.
Each premises is administered by a nearby hospital, which provides staff and equipment necessary to operate the clinic and receive the loads of vaccine from federal providers.
The Montgomery website is designed as a one-week training venue and has no plans to reopen after this week.
The Selma Clinic ended Wednesday afternoon after all of its doses were released in just three days.
Maegan Austin, spokeswoman for Vaughan Regional Medical Center in Selma, said the Selma site would house a clinic once a week on Thursday through ADPH, but that it would not reopen as a mass vaccination site before the hospital reopened. do not receive a large amount of vaccine. .
Harris said it is up to each clinic to keep their drive-through surgery open from now on.
‘Any supplier who receives [vaccine] product is definitely free to issue it as they wish, ”he said. ‘You know, some providers prefer to have a large-scale clinic setting. Some may want to do this by making appointments one by one. ”
He said that these surgeries can be a labor-intensive process and that it does not make sense if the clinics offer a lower number of appointments.
“Normally you transport everything, all the equipment and all your staff and all your necessities from a place where you have already been vaccinated to a place where you are not vaccinated,” Harris said. ‘And so they’re just resource intensive to do. And I think unless you generally have a lot of vaccines to give really very fast, people are not going to do that in a mass clinic environment. ”
The distribution of shots that will be administered at each mass clinic from Friday morning is as follows:
- Birmingham (3 places) – 12 139 doses
- Huntsville – 12,000 doses
- Mobile (4 sites) – 22,325 doses
- Anniston – 5,000 doses
- Dothan – 6,100 doses
- Montgomery – 8,000 doses
- Selma – 5,000 doses
- Tuscaloosa – 5889 doses
- Total – 76 453 doses
Some clinics will administer doses Friday and Saturday, and Harris said the total could rise as the data imported from the remote sites is longer than normal.
Spokesmen for the Birmingham, Huntsville, Dothan websites said these sites would remain open next week, although some would do so with reduced capacity. The U.S. Health Clinic in Mobile says they will continue to schedule appointments to receive the vaccine via its online registry. AL.com is determining which of the other sites will remain open next week.
* Updated at 15:00 with new totals from the vaccination sites