vaccination Archives - The Provincetown Independent

vaccination

PUBLIC HEALTH

Kindergarten Vaccination Rates Fall Short

Lack of ‘herd immunity’ risks outbreak of preventable diseases

By Christine Legere Sep 18, 2024

The immunization of children entering kindergarten against preventable diseases in all four towns on Outer Cape Cod lags far behind statewide averages. In both Truro and Provincetown, less than 80 percent of the children have been fully vaccinated, according to the most recent state statistics.

Eight-year-old Lola Schiffer-Kehou receives her first Covid vaccination in a photo taken during the pandemic. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)

The Mass. Dept. of Public Health (DPH) requires that kindergartners be vaccinated for polio (4 doses), measles, mumps, and rubella (2 MMR doses), diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (5 DTaP doses), hepatitis B (3 doses), and chicken pox (2 varicella doses). Compliance with the requirements falls to local school districts.

For schools with fewer than 30 kindergartners, as is true in all four Outer Cape towns, the DPH provides immunization data in three-year averages. Only 77 percent of the children entering Truro Central School in 2021-2024 have been fully immunized, according to DPH data. Provincetown’s three-year average for entering kindergartners is almost as low, with only 79 percent fully vaccinated.

At Wellfleet Elementary, 85 percent of entering kindergartners have had all required immunizations, and in Eastham the percentage is 88.

Statewide, approximately 94.4 percent of kindergartners were fully vaccinated in that same three-year period; in Barnstable County, it was 92.6 percent.

Vaccines protect not only the person vaccinated but also those around them by blocking the spread of disease. The higher the percentage of people vaccinated, the lower the chance of an outbreak of — a concept referred to as “herd immunity.”

Immunization also protects members of the community who are either too young to be vaccinated or can’t be immunized because of a medical condition.

According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, about four million deaths from childhood diseases worldwide are prevented by vaccination every year.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sets herd immunity for measles at 95 percent. Provincetown is therefore potentially vulnerable to a measles outbreak because only 86 percent of its kindergarten students were inoculated. Statewide, 96.3 percent of kindergartners were inoculated against measles in 2024.

According to the CDC, there have been 251 reported cases of measles in the U.S. so far this year; in 88 percent of those cases, the person was not inoculated. Nearly half were under five years old, and more than half of that younger group required hospitalization.

A Dearth of Pediatricians

Dr. Barry Zuckerman of Wellfleet, former chair of pediatrics at Boston Medical Center, said the dearth of pediatricians on the Outer Cape is likely a factor in the low vaccination rates. “I’m not even sure how many family medicine doctors there are,” he said. “They would be the only other ones giving shots to kids.”

“It is hard to know exactly why vaccination rates on the Outer Cape are different,” said DPH spokesman Omar Cabrera in an email. “Factors that negatively impact vaccine confidence include mistrust of health authorities, vaccine misinformation from media sources and social contacts, lower health/science literacy and ‘vaccine fatigue.’ ”

Zuckerman said the “right-wing social media stuff is extraordinarily anti-vaccines. You know all your Trump voters are tuning in to those media.”

In Massachusetts, parents may keep their children from being vaccinated either with a medical exemption from the child’s doctor or a religious exemption, if the parents declare it conflicts with their religious beliefs.

Barnstable and Dukes counties have the highest combined rate of religious and medical exemptions in the state. Barnstable’s rate is 3.5 percent and Dukes County’s is 4.8 percent for 2024.

“We have seen higher rates of exemptions on Cape Cod and the Islands for many years,” Cabrera said, adding that the current numbers are not very different from the pre-Covid era.

Truro had the county’s highest combined rate of exemptions at 13 percent, according to state data. Eastham’s rate was 8 percent, Wellfleet’s 5 percent, and Provincetown’s 2 percent. But while Provincetown’s exemption rate was the lowest, its “gap” rate was highest at 19 percent: students with neither all required vaccines nor exemptions on file.

Truro Supt. Stephanie Costigan said her data show that 92 percent of the school’s kindergartners are “in compliance” with state requirements for the current school year. She said that calculation classifies children with exemptions as compliant.

Provincetown Supt. Gerry Goyette said his district is still “crunching the numbers” on students who aren’t vaccinated. “When the nurse does the state survey, she reaches out to each individual family who needs immunizations and assists them,” he said. “Immunizations seem to be a disconnect with some families, but upon communication with the nurse they make plans to bring students up to date.”

Wellfleet Elementary Principal Adam O’Shea said school nurse Claudia Cope-Crosen produces an immunization noncompliance report that leads to letters and phone calls to families not fully immunized.

“Recognizing that one of the barriers on the Outer Cape is access to primary care, Claudia Cope-Crosen worked in coordination with the Cape Cod VNA [Visiting Nurse Association] to provide vaccine access,” said O’Shea in an email.

Mary Ellen Reed, the Nauset school district’s director of health services, said immunization policies are uniform districtwide. Medical exemptions are rare, she said, and most exemptions are religious.

“If it’s a religious exemption, we try to provide education about what it would mean if we had an outbreak in the school,” Reed said. Children who have not been fully immunized for the disease would be blocked from attending school, she said.

Sometimes, health insurance can be a barrier to being fully vaccinated, Reed added. The school will help families get assistance with securing insurance through Health Connections at Outer Cape Health Services.

“We have pediatric vaccination standing orders across all three sites to reduce vaccination barriers,” said OCHS CEO Dr. Damian Archer. “Last fall we did a project on vaccinations for ages zero to two years and raised our vaccine rates by 20-plus percent. Overall, the biggest challenge we face is parent hesitancy due to cultural, religious, and political values.”

COVID PREVENTION

After Mandates, Few Cape Health Workers Remain Unvaccinated

98 percent of OCHS employees have been immunized

By Cam Blair Dec 15, 2021

Very few health-care workers on Cape Cod have been fired for refusing to comply with vaccine mandates, according to spokespeople at three major providers.

The vaccination rates among staff at Outer Cape Health Services, Cape Cod Healthcare, and Spaulding Rehabilitation are now all reported to be at or above 96 percent. Unvaccinated workers were granted exemptions for religious or medical reasons.

Outer Cape Health Services, with clinics in Provincetown, Wellfleet, and Harwich Port, reported that 98 percent of its employees are fully vaccinated. Five of OCHS’s 250 employees applied for and received exemptions and are tested weekly, according to Senior Communications Officer Gerry Desautels. No staff were let go for failing to comply, and vaccination is required for all new hires, he said.

OCHS employees who sought religious exemptions were required to provide “a statement of their belief and the religion or religious doctrine it is based in,” Desautels said in an email. Those exemptions are protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. In August, the Diocese of Fall River announced it would not issue letters for members of the Catholic Church seeking a religious exemption.

Those who applied for disability exemptions were required to submit a letter from a health-care provider within the scope of the provider’s practice “citing the specific reason as to why they cannot medically receive the vaccine.” People with permanent disabilities seeking exemptions are protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Desautels said.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only a handful of rare allergies make the Covid-19 vaccine unsafe. “Like one in a million,” Dr. Peter Chin-Hong told CBS News in September.

Desautels said that, for confidentiality reasons, he could not disclose whether the five OCHS employees who received exemptions have direct contact with the public.

One hundred percent of staff at Spaulding Rehabilitation’s Orleans and Hyannis facilities are vaccinated, according to Director of Communications Timothy Sullivan. Not every staff member is vaccinated at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Sandwich. But, Sullivan said, the number there is in line with the 99.3-percent compliance rate at Mass General Brigham, which owns Spaulding.

Sullivan said that no employees were fired at Spaulding in Orleans or Hyannis, but some employees in Sandwich were. He said that the number of fired workers was in line with Mass General Brigham’s organization-wide figures. The parent company, which has 80,000 employees, terminated 430 of them (0.5 percent) for choosing to remain unvaccinated. Last month the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to Mass General Brigham’s vaccine mandate brought by a group of the fired employees.

Cape Cod Healthcare had over 200 of its more than 5,000 employees claim exemptions, according to Senior Vice President of Communications Patrick Kane. In September, before the mandate was in effect, the Cape Cod Times reported that the number of unvaccinated employees was 500. Kane declined to say where the remaining unvaccinated employees who claimed exemptions work. Cape Cod Healthcare runs Cape Cod Hospital and Falmouth Hospital and has over 100 other facilities from Orleans to Bourne. Kane did note that four employees declined to follow the mandate and left the organization.

Desautels and Sullivan both noted that their organizations had strong vaccination numbers among staff even before the mandates. Nationally, health-care workers are more likely to be vaccinated than ordinary Americans, but prior to the mandates in September, 30 percent of health-care workers were unvaccinated, according to the CDC.

Each of the three Cape health organizations implemented their own private mandates separate from those taking place at the government level. Those mandates are ensnared in legal challenges. The Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid programs, announced this fall, is currently being challenged in Missouri and Louisiana federal district courts. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicaid Services stopped enforcing that mandate, which applies to 17 million health-care workers, on Dec. 2.

The administration’s plan to require Covid vaccinations for private companies with 100 or more employees, issued by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is also on hold. On Nov. 6, a New Orleans federal appeals court said the order was too broad, calling it a “one-size-fits-all sledgehammer.” That mandate would apply to 84 million American workers.

COVID-19 UPDATE

Outer Cape Kids and Parents Feel Relief About Pediatric Vaccine

Gatherings, family vacations, and going back to school

By Michaela Chesin Dec 1, 2021

PROVINCETOWN — With crayons and pages of coloring books scattered over the floor around them, Alaina and Kacey Vida sit in the waiting area of a Walgreens Pharmacy. It’s the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and they are about to get their first Covid-19 vaccinations.

“I’m excited to get the shot because I want to be safe, and I’m nervous because I don’t really like shots,” says nine-year-old Alaina, clutching “Pandy,” a plush panda head. Her sister, seven-year-old Kacey, holds a toy Ariel a few feet away. “It’s important in order to stay healthy,” she adds.

While Covid-19 vaccines have been available for all adults since April, and for children 12 years or older since May, kids between 5 and 11 were not eligible for the shots until early November. The long-awaited authorization has provided relief for many Outer Cape families, opening up the opportunity for gatherings, vacations, and, in some cases, school.

“I’ll allow them to do more things once everybody’s protected,” says the girls’ mom, Tracy Kachtick-Anders. The family’s 12 kids (five of whom no longer live at home) have been getting vaccinated in batches, depending on their age and eligibility.

Kachtick-Anders was reluctant to put her son Wyatt, who has Down syndrome and is immunocompromised, back in the classroom. “My fear was that he can’t tell me where the cases are coming from, like if the cases were just the football team or people coming from Bourne,” she says. “He’s at risk, so I haven’t sent him to school.”

Now she’s feeling a sense of relief. She is planning a trip to Disney World, the first that the whole family would be able to take since the pandemic started almost two years ago. “I’m excited to sleep in the hotel,” says Kacey, smiling, “to go on the airplane, and to see Mickey Mouse, Minnie, Daisy Duck, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, Ariel, Elsa, and Anna.”

Tracy Kachtick-Anders holds nine-year-old daughter Alaina Vida’s hand as she receives her first Covid-19 vaccination. [Photo Michaela Chesin]

Trial data for the pediatric vaccine was collected, vetted, and authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a statement on Nov. 2 recommending that children between ages 5 and 11 get the Pfizer pediatric vaccine, which has the same active ingredients as the adult and adolescent vaccine but a third of the dosage (10 micrograms). Like the adult vaccine, the pediatric version requires two injections given three weeks apart.

The adolescent (or adult) and pediatric vaccines are not to be used interchangeably, according to the CDC. Pfizer is the only pharmaceutical or biotechnology company to have an approved pediatric vaccine, and no vaccine has yet been authorized for children younger than five. The pediatric vaccine is 91 percent effective in preventing Covid-19, according to a Mayo Clinic webpage.

“I felt very happy to get the vaccine,” says 10-year-old Sally Hay. “I soon won’t have to wear a mask as much as before.” She got her first dose with her seven-year-old sister, Nora, on Nov.18. They were both taken out of Wellfleet Elementary School and home-schooled for part of the pandemic when the family found remote learning to be too challenging. Since their full-time return to the classroom in April, “there’s been a lurking uneasiness,” says their mother, Elspeth Hay. “It’s nice to have the opportunity for them to get vaccinated after so long.”

Since the start of the pandemic, about 1.9 million children between 5 and 11 have been infected with the coronavirus. More than 8,300 have been hospitalized and 94 have died, according to data released by the CDC in November.

The death toll in the past year put Covid as one of the top 10 causes of death for this age group, says Outer Cape Health physician assistant Gretchen Eckel. In November, cases among children jumped 32 percent in a two-week period, according to a statement released by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association.

Eckel says she recommends that kids in the 5 to 11 age group get vaccinated, because, while the virus is milder in children, vaccinating more of the population will reduce transmission within the community and suppress the continued evolution of the virus into more dangerous variants.

Eckel also warns of post-Covid conditions that have been identified in children, such as long-term headaches and fatigue, and, in rarer cases, multisystem inflammatory syndrome, affecting different parts of the body, including vital organs. The condition is serious and, in some cases, deadly, Eckel says.

Effects at School

There are no active Covid cases at Wellfleet Elementary School, Truro Central School, or Provincetown Schools, according to school officials. So far this school year, there have been 15 cases at Wellfleet Elementary, four cases at Truro Central, and two cases in the Provincetown Schools.

A mask order from the Dept. of Elementary and Secondary Education remains in place “until a school has an 80-percent vaccination rate,” says Wellfleet Elementary School nurse Claudia Cope. She notes that vaccination status changes the conditions and protocols under which a student would be considered a close contact.

“One of the main reasons there are school nurses is to monitor the spread of contagious diseases, and to reduce the impact of things like this pandemic,” Provincetown Schools Nurse Mary-Beth Maloney says. “I’m finding a lot of parents are pro-vaccination in terms of how many people are calling me enthused, finding out they can get one close to home.”

Where to Go

“The main question I am getting from families is where to go,” Cope says.

Kachtick-Anders says she was not able to get local appointments for her children in time for their upcoming trip, so she drove them from Provincetown to Mashpee for their vaccinations.

Kacey Vida watches a nurse apply a Band-Aid after getting her first Covid vaccination. “That wasn’t bad,” she shrugged moments later. [Photo Michaela Chesin]

Wellfleet resident Sarah Hill has an upcoming vaccine appointment booked for her fifth-grader, Eli, with a friend’s private pediatrician. “It’s hard to get vaccines otherwise,” she says,

Outer Cape Health Services CEO Patricia Nadle says there have been no shortages of vaccines or people manning the phones. “OCHS has been giving vaccines to the 5-to-11-year-olds since the second week of November, by appointment only, at all of our three health centers,” she says. So far, 40 to 50 pediatric vaccine doses have been given weekly across the three sites.

Eckel says that OCHS can’t offer vaccinations on demand, but they are available at weekly clinics that may vary by week. “There is a limited amount of vials that we’re not prepared to waste,” she says. Sally and Nora were two of the children who received vaccinations at one of those clinics.

Meanwhile, the schools are organizing their own clinics. The Provincetown Schools are having a vaccination clinic on Monday, Dec. 6, while Truro is in the process of planning one. “We’re hoping to announce a date for families very soon, whether it be at the school or the community center,” says Truro Central School Principal Patrick Riley.

Eli says a lot of his friends have gotten vaccinated, which has been exciting. “It also just makes me feel a little bit safer,” he adds.

CHILDREN'S HEALTH

Two Bills Aim to Boost Child Immunizations

Low vaccination rates in Wellfleet, Eastham sway Peake and Cyr

By Christine Legere Aug 25, 2021

There is not yet a Covid-19 vaccine for children under 12. But public awareness of the importance of vaccination has cast the Outer Cape’s low childhood immunization rates in a new light.

Two bills pending in the Mass. legislature — one co-sponsored by Rep. Sarah Peake of Provincetown, the other by Sen. Julian Cyr of Truro — aim to address the issue by making it much tougher to get exemptions from vaccine requirements.

To be admitted to kindergarten, children must be immunized against hepatitis B, MMR (measles, mumps, rubella), DTap (diptheria, tetanus, pertussis), polio, and varicella (chicken pox). There are two routes around that mandate: a medical exemption via a doctor’s note, or a religious exemption that simply requires the guardian to submit a form.

For the last school year, 95.1 percent of kindergartners statewide had received the full series of immunizations; 1.1 percent of children statewide had vaccine exemptions. But Barnstable County’s exemption rate is higher: 2.6 percent, almost all for religious reasons.

Eastham and Wellfleet have had even higher exemption rates in recent years: in Eastham, 5.9 percent in 2019-2020, and in Wellfleet 12.5 percent, in a study conducted from 2016 to 2018.

The two bills address exemptions in different ways. The bill filed by Haverhill Democrat Andy Vargas and co-sponsored by Peake would eliminate the religious exemption. More than 75 percent of the exemptions statewide are for religious reasons.

“There’s no major religion that has prohibitions against protecting kids with vaccination,” said Peake, noting that Wellfleet’s exemption percentage is “at the top of the list.”

Several other states have eliminated nonmedical exemptions, including Connecticut, New York, and Maine.

The second bill, filed by Sen. Becca Rausch and Rep. Paul Donato and cosponsored by Cyr, would move the exemption approval process from local jurisdictions to the state Dept. of Public Health, which would follow a list of qualifying conditions.

Data on exemptions is self-reported by school districts, resulting in gaps. In 2019-2020, 520 kindergartens statewide failed to report immunization data to the state, according to Rausch’s website. There is also no current requirement for parents to be notified if a school falls below herd immunity against a preventable disease.

Cyr pointed to the comparatively low rate of immunization against measles in Wellfleet and some schools on the islands. “Having a measles outbreak is possible, given the vaccine rate,” he said. Cyr’s district includes Nantucket and Dukes counties, where exemption rates for the current year were 7.3 and 8.5, respectively.

“It’s really about getting better information on why families are opting out,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s about safety in schools.”

In 2019, Outer Cape Health Services launched a research project to understand the reasons why increasing numbers of parents were rejecting vaccines, focusing on birth to age three. But the pandemic delayed the work. “By the time the nine-month project was coming to a close in spring 2020, the pandemic and lockdown prohibited our family outreach,” said Gretchen Eckel, OCHS director for child health services, in an email. That outreach has now resumed.

“Vaccinating our youth can be the single most important preventive medicine strategy pediatric providers have to make a lifelong impact on a child’s health,” Eckel said.

OCHS spokesman Gerard Desautels said only 41 percent of current three-year-old patients from the four Outer Cape towns are up to date on required vaccinations.

Vaccination data for Truro Central School are not available from the state, nor are Provincetown’s, Eastham’s, or Wellfleet’s for 2020-2021. But based on other sources, rates in Truro and Provincetown appear to be higher than in Wellfleet and Eastham.

According to the state’s 2019-2020 data, only 88 percent of Eastham kindergartners had received the full series of required vaccinations. The Wellfleet study found that only 77 percent of its kindergartners were fully immunized.

Truro Supt. Stephanie Costigan said every entering kindergartner in 2020 was fully vaccinated, and there were no exemptions.

Provincetown Supt. Suzanne Scallion also reported that 100 percent of kindergartners were vaccinated and there were no exemptions. Scallion attributed it to outreach. “Our nurse works with families who need assistance with appointments or translation,” she said.

School nurses at the Eastham and Wellfleet elementary schools were not available to provide data for this story.

The proposed bills have generated pushback. The Independent attempted to contact Cape Cod parents who who signed a petition against the Rausch bill, but none responded. Lynn Smith of West Dennis, who said her two daughters have never been vaccinated, was reached through an the group Health Choice 4 Action Massachusetts. She got a religious exemption for her children and is opposed to both bills.

Part of her objection is political. “I don’t think politicians should interfere with a parent’s choice,” she said. Smith also said she thought the push to reach herd immunity via vaccination was “a false argument meant to make people compliant.”

Smith believes herd immunity should be achieved through exposure: “If you are exposed to live virus, you would have a broader natural immunity,” she said. But according to the CDC’s FAQ on vaccines for children, “natural immunity usually results in better immunity than vaccination,” the problem is “the risks are much greater.”

Asked about the religious exemption, Smith said her reasoning is based on the fact that some vaccines are made with aborted fetal cell lines. “I’m pro-choice, but I’m not comfortable with aborted fetal cell lines being injected into my daughters,” she said.

According to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Vaccine Education Center, while fetal cells dating to tissue collected in the 1960s is used to grow the viruses used in the MMR vaccine, the vaccines do not contain these cells.

Retired pediatrician Pamela Zuckerman said she had crossed paths with numerous parents skeptical of vaccines during her career, but one case has stayed with her: a four-year-old girl whose parents refused the MMR vaccine. The child got the measles, and pneumonia followed. “I have memories of doing her vent care,” Zuckerman recalled. “The downside is terrible if your child gets sick.”

Cyr is optimistic that people will come around on vaccines. Covid-19, he said, has been a game changer, with the governor issuing vaccination mandates for state employees and businesses following suit.

“If you want to live in a society that isn’t continually plagued with preventable disease, vaccination is the means,” he said.

THE ROAD TO NORMAL

Glimmers of Hope for Vaccinations on the Outer Cape

Community health centers could provide alternative to mass sites

By Paul Benson Feb 24, 2021

PROVINCETOWN — When it comes to allocating Covid resources, Cape Cod has been treated like a distant afterthought. The state hasn’t opened a free Stop the Spread testing site here, and it was even a struggle getting the money to organize the self-pay, $75-per-test site in Hyannis.

Initial inquiries were made about opening a MassVax site at Cape Cod Community College, but the state ultimately opted for only six sites, all on the mainland. Local boards of health representing the 15 towns of Cape Cod have received a pitiful 200 doses total since vaccinations began. The Barnstable County Health Dept. has taken a leading role in vaccine requests and delivery on Cape Cod, yet it has been given only 975 doses per week.

The state’s vaccine rollout has been so flawed that state Rep. Sarah Peake called it the “Covid Hunger Games.” (Photo Nancy Bloom)

The Baker administration has been prioritizing MassVax sites and the CVS and Walgreens pharmacy chains in its vaccine distribution decisions. Those outlets require people to register online for a vaccine appointment, a process that has been so frustrating and flawed that state Rep. Sarah Peake called it the “Covid Hunger Games.” Once secured, a MassVax appointment requires a long drive off Cape, which is why state Sen. Julian Cyr said, “The current registration and appointment system is benefitting the fittest, the most tech-savvy, and those with wheels.”

Amid this uproar comes a glimmer of good news. Even though Gov. Charlie Baker told hospitals and local boards of health they wouldn’t be getting new vaccine allocations this month, he kept community health centers (CHCs) as part of his plan. President Joe Biden’s administration has also announced a plan to funnel vaccines to CHCs nationwide. This makes Outer Cape Health Services (OCHS) and the Community Health Center of Cape Cod, both of which are federally qualified CHCs, more important parts of the local vaccine picture.

Even so, local leaders see a Cape Cod-sized loophole forming. On Feb. 17, the state announced that towns and cities would receive direct vaccine allocations only if they formed a “regional collaborative” that could collectively administer 750 doses a day. Barnstable County already is a “regional collaborative,” and it has administered multiple 800-dose-per-day clinics in various parts of the Cape.

“If they can send us 800 doses per day, we can get that into people’s arms,” said Peake this week.

“We could meet that capacity requirement,” said Sean O’Brien, the county’s health director.

“We are organizing to make a request for vaccine on those terms,” confirmed Frank Schulze, Cyr’s communications director. “Hopefully, we’ll have more to say about this next week.”

Calling the Vulnerable

One of the reasons CHCs are receiving attention is they have existing provider relationships with vulnerable, hard-to-reach people. CHCs tend to be located in remote or under-resourced areas. They can directly schedule their oldest and sickest patients for vaccination appointments, instead of forcing those patients to navigate an online version of Thunderdome. They also do not present a transportation challenge. For remote communities such as the Outer Cape, it’s the difference between getting vaccinated at home or a few minutes away, in Wellfleet or Provincetown, or driving a few hours to Gillette Stadium in Foxboro.

OCHS has administered first and second doses to 300 phase-one medical workers, said Gerry Desautels, the clinic’s communications director, and, as of Feb. 22, it had given first doses to another 1,100 people.

“We are receiving a few hundred doses per week between our three health center sites” in Provincetown, Wellfleet, and Harwich, said Desautels. “We are working through a list of eligible patients as quickly as we can, making sure to personally reach out first to our most vulnerable patients.

“For those who are homebound or otherwise unable to travel, OCHS will be working with the local towns to vaccinate those populations in their residences,” Desautels added.

‘Closed’ vs. ‘Open’ Clinics

“If we can get to those oldest, most vulnerable people first, that’s going to do a heck of a lot of good in saving lives,” said Cyr. “If we’re going to have limited vaccine, I would prefer to see [vaccines going to] these targeted closed clinics that get to the most needy residents, instead of this privatized MassVax system.”

Vaccination appointments at “closed clinics” are made directly. They’re not available to the wider public. Most of Barnstable County’s clinics have been “open” — like MassVax — with appointments made via the state’s main site, which has been plagued with problems. Barnstable County is running its first closed clinic on Thursday, Feb. 25, in Eastham, said the county’s communications director, Sonja Sheasley. Its 280 doses will be allocated equally to the four Outer Cape towns, with the local health depts. in charge of identifying underserved residents who are eligible for vaccination. The Feb. 25 clinic is the only closed clinic currently scheduled by the county, Sheasley added.

This means that, for people who are currently eligible for the Covid vaccine, it’s a good idea to be in touch with your doctor, your local board of health, or possibly both.

“Vaccine-eligible OCHS patients can call to schedule an appointment,” said Desautels. People who are not existing patients can go to outercape.org’s Covid page and fill out a patient registration form first.

People who don’t have a doctor already may find it easier to go directly to their town’s health dept. If the CHCs and the county continue to get increased allocations, they may become an easier route to vaccination than a trek off Cape.

Update: On Wednesday, Feb. 24 (after this week’s Independent went to press), Cape Cod leaders announced that the state had approved the Cape Cod Regional Vaccine Consortium. Cape Cod Healthcare will run a large-scale vaccination site at Cape Cod Community College in Barnstable, with the capacity to administer at least 3,750 doses per week. Outer Cape Health Services and the Community Health Center of Cape Cod will collaborate with the 15 municipal boards of health on a program to vaccinate homebound seniors in their homes. The county health department will continue vaccination clinics at four sites: Falmouth, Orleans, Eastham, and Truro. Collectively, these efforts will account for nearly 6,000 doses per week on Cape Cod, contingent on the state’s ability to supply that many doses.

health

Outer Cape Immunization Rates Among Lowest in State

Just 77% of Wellfleet kindergartners have been fully vaccinated

By Sophie Ruehr Nov 14, 2019

polio virus image — 3D CG rendered image of scientifically accurate Polio Virus.

WELLFLEET — A large number of children who visit the Outer Cape Health Services clinic here are “under-vaccinated” — having not received a full series of standard immunizations against infectious diseases, which are required under state law for school admission.

Only 77 percent of the kindergartners at the Wellfleet Elementary School in the past three years have been fully immunized against hepatitis B, MMR (measles, mumps, rubella), DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis), polio, and varicella (chickenpox), according to the Mass. Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences. This puts Wellfleet Elementary in the 10th percentile for immunizations statewide.

At Eastham Elementary, the immunization rate is only slightly higher, with 83 percent of kindergartners having received a full series of vaccines.