Though declining demand has led to the transition away from Northern Light’s mass vaccination site at the Cross Insurance Center, hundreds of people a day are getting their shots at a new site in Union Street in Bangor, according to an official with the healthcare provider.
Nurses are administering more than a thousand shots a week at the health center, located in Northern Light’s HealthCare Mall on Union Street. While many have appointments, the site has also seen numerous walk-ins since it opened on May 11, said Dr. James Jarvis, who leads Northern Light’s COVID-19 response.
The transition from mass vaccination clinics to more personalized medical settings has begun to occur in Maine and nationwide as vaccine demand has declined.
Just more than half of Mainers have now received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, meaning that there are about 668,000 who have yet to receive at least one of the shots, including 160,000 children under 12 who are currently ineligible. More than 700,000 have received fewer than two shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.
Medical officials like Jarvis hope that offering the vaccines in more personalized medical environments, including hospitals, can reach people who weren’t inclined to sign up for an appointment at a mass vaccination center. Getting shots in arms of those people will be integral to achieving herd immunity as half a million eligible Mainers remain unvaccinated.
As many as half to two-thirds of people getting vaccinated at the health clinic are below 18, Jarvis said. Many young people could be seen walking into the clinic with their parents on Tuesday afternoon, including 14-year-old Lauren Hogan, who went with her mother, Holly Hogan, 46, both of Glenburn.
Lauren had only become eligible to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine about a week before, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the emergency use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for people between 12 and 15 years old.
“I’m excited, “ Lauren Hogan said. “I feel like things are gonna get better from here on out.”
While she was involved in her daughter’s decision to get vaccinated, Holly Hogan said her daughter ultimately yearned for the normalcy getting the vaccine could help bring. Holly praised the clinic for being an efficient and welcoming place for people like Lauren.
“It’s our decision and her decision,” Holly Hogan said. “It’s one step closer to helping everybody get through this pandemic.”
Many Mainers widely lauded Northern Light’s mass vaccination site at the Cross Insurance Center for its efficiency and the scale of the operation, which peaked at vaccinating 3,000 people a day. The center will hold its last clinic on May 27.
Jarvis said that he had been happy with the turnout at the Union Street site. While the numbers hadn’t reached the levels of the Cross Center, they weren’t expected to, given the lowered demand that already had prompted the move to the smaller health center. There were about 200 appointments on Tuesday, with up to 100 walk-ins expected.
But Northern Light is always looking to reach more of the population, he said, whether at the health clinic or in administering vaccines at many of its practices across the state, as it tries to help Maine and the United States achieve the herd immunity necessary for normalcy. Just as the facility has recently seen an influx of people in the recently approved 12-15 age group, Jarvis said he expects numbers could increase as even younger children become eligible.
“We don’t have any stated goal at this point” in terms of how many people Northern Light is trying to vaccinate each week, he said. “We’re really letting the community’s needs drive what we need to do with this particular facility.”
As the system works to gradually bring down the number of unvaccinated people, the information battle becomes paramount, he said.
Jarvis said he had heard all of the misinformation about the vaccine, including about side effects and testing. It’s all easily refutable, he said, but the job of medical officials is to hit home how effective vaccines have been in stemming the spread of COVID-19, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S.
“We now have hundreds of millions of individuals who received these vaccines without any long-term consequences,” Jarvis said.
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