NC may start offering COVID shots to front-line workers within weeks, Meck health says
North Carolina could move to begin vaccinating front-line essential workers within a month, Mecklenburg County Health Director Gibbie Harris said Wednesday.
The state is currently offering vaccines to health care workers, residents and staff of long-term care facilities and anyone age 65 and older.
The next group of people eligible to receive the vaccine, Group 3, includes front-line essential workers like law enforcement officers, teachers, grocery store employees and TSA workers.
“The challenge with Group 3 is it’s huge,” Harris said.
She expects the state will begin encouraging counties to start vaccinating that group “at some point in the next month at the latest,” Harris told reporters Wednesday.
“We’re not talking about June or July,” she said. “We’re talking probably more March, April time frame.”
In a news conference Tuesday, N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper said it would likely be “a number of weeks” before COVID-19 vaccines were made available to Group 3, the (Raleigh) News & Observer reported.
Harris said vaccine supply will limit how quickly the county is able to vaccinate Groups 1, 2 and 3.
“If the floodgates were to open, and we had more vaccine than we knew what to do with, we could burn through these groups fairly quickly,” she said. “I don’t see that happening.”
But she did say she has seen an improvement in vaccine supply and expects to see that continue through the next few months.
‘Moving in the right direction’
Mecklenburg County so far has administered 82,358 vaccines — including 66,484 first doses, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services.
“We are moving in the right direction,” Harris said. “We are getting people vaccinated... But it’s going to be a while before we can fully open things in our community.”
The news of possible vaccine expansion comes as Mecklenburg County reckons with newly released demographic data that shows Black people are getting the COVID-19 vaccine at lower rates than white people in the Charlotte area.
The data only shows demographic data for shots administered by the county health department — a small percentage of total shots administered in Mecklenburg. But the county will soon be able to access demographics for the entire county, including shots administered by the major hospital systems, Harris said.
“We know that there are some populations who are disproportionately affected by this virus,” Harris said. “And we need to see that they’re getting more of the vaccine — a higher percentage of the vaccine. That’s work that we still have left to do in our communities.”
Plans for Walgreens vaccines
Mecklenburg could see a small influx of COVID-19 vaccines as Walgreens begins vaccinating eligible patients, Harris said Wednesday.
Walgreens announced it will bring COVID-19 vaccines to 300 locations in North Carolina, but has not released the list of locations publicly.
“It’s not a huge amount (of vaccines), but it’s better than what we’ve been receiving,” Harris said. “…That’s good news for us in Mecklenburg County.”
This story was originally published February 3, 2021 at 2:34 PM with the headline "NC may start offering COVID shots to front-line workers within weeks, Meck health says."
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