Vaccines Made More Accessible Through Fleets of Mobile Clinics

Across the United States, health officials and community leaders have taken vaccines on the road to effectively reach unvaccinated groups. These include the homeless, people without internet access, and areas without reliable transportation. This solution is being done to significantly address the gap in the country’s inoculation efforts.

In East Los Angeles, the city has considered reducing its mass vaccination sites to increase its mobile units from 10 to 14. The trend of further expanding mobile clinic fleets is also being observed in Delaware, Washington State, and Minnesota.

A lot of the people in Sussex County, Delaware are known to live in poverty making them more vulnerable to the coronavirus. Arriving at a vaccination appointment can also be extremely time-consuming and costly, losing a valuable day’s wages.

In April, healthcare professionals and local partners were able to secure a bus that used to function as a mobile library. It has since been repurposed to function as a mobile vaccination site.

Within Washington State, less than half of all its residents have been fully vaccinated. In an extensive effort to bolster these numbers, a mobile clinic was deployed on May 17 in Pioneer Square, an area with several missions and a large homeless population.

The team involved was mostly geared to administer second doses of the Moderna vaccine, but they still catered to people who were looking for a first dose. This program was aimed at filling in the gaps, especially in terms of opportunity, funds, and access.

Just a couple of miles from St. Cloud, Minnesota, a city with a population of around 70,000 people, lies a fruit and vegetable farm with around 100 workers who live in close quarters. The potential for mass infection is extremely high.

This is just one of the many areas in Minnesota where there is a significant lack of access to technology and transportation, which can prove to spell the difference between life and death. The owners of the farm, John and Julie Svihel, procured a mobile clinic on May 12 to help address the looming issue.

Early in the year, the Minnesota Department of Health along with local partners and clinical support from Blue Cross Blue Shield transformed six city buses into clinics. Since April 12, these buses have rolled out to homeless-services providers, farms, rural communities, and multifamily housing units capable of vaccinating anywhere between 10 and 180 people.

Source: The New York Times