WORCESTER — A Hail Mary is how Dr. Michael Hirsh, the city’s chief medical officer, described a state program that offers a $75 gift card to anyone who receives a COVID-19 vaccine or booster shot at certain clinics.
Sports reference means a desperate attempt to win at the last minute in the box or box, but Friday Hirsh implemented it for Get Boosted, a vaccination program established through the state Department of Public Health that gives gift cards.
“I think it reflects a point of frustration that the public fitness network has with the public’s reaction to those vaccine offerings, adding the new bivalent booster,” said Hirsh, who came under pressure because his prospects didn’t mirror those of the city’s public fitness. Department.
“(The $75) is a bit of a Hail Mary, I think. We have tried everything.
The purpose of Get Boosted is to develop COVID-19 vaccination in the state’s 20 vaccine equity communities, known through the state Department of Public Health as the most impacted by COVID-19 due to social and economic factors. Worcester, Fitchburg and Leominster are among the 20 communities.
“Personally, I don’t like the ($75) approach,” he said Hirsh. No I like the types of incentives.
“We tried, giving away Chromebooks, gift certificates to local grocery stores. I think it’s a safe point of resistance, not just resistance to the COVID vaccine, resistance to all vaccines.
Dr. Estevan Garcia, lead medical officer for the state’s DPH, doesn’t see Get Boosted as an act of desperation in light of Massachusetts’ existing vaccination and booster rates.
“This is not a hail Mary. We are looking for tactics to vaccinate communities,” Garcia said.
Worcester lags behind the state when it comes to vaccination rates, according to a review of numbers provided through the city and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As of Friday, 77% of Worcester citizens had one of the two-dose COVID-19 vaccines, up from 95% statewide.
Those with either dose are 65% to 88% successful statewide. The point for those with at least one recall is 35% to 55% statewide.
The number that jumps out is the extraordinarily low percentage of those who have the moment or the so-called bivalent memory that provides coverage opposite to the highly contagious variant of omicron: 8% in Worcester, according to Hirsch, 12. 7% nationally.
The public fitness network is frustrated, Hirsh said, because it has done everything it can to give citizens access and convenience to vaccines and boosters, but the numbers are growing.
This is due to a lack of evidence.
Hirsh praised Dr. Mitilde Castiel, the city’s social and fitness commissioner, for making vaccines available in underserved parts of the city, adding churches, public housing, networking centers and small supermarkets/convenience stores.
In addition, normal vaccination clinics were held at the Worcester Public Library, YWCA and Mercantile Center. The city’s cellular vaccination van toured neighborhoods and the UMass Memorial Health medical and nursing student vaccination corps was deployed throughout the city to administer the vaccines.
These efforts haven’t been enough to expand Worcester beyond a 65% vaccination rate for any of the number one COVID-19 vaccines, and Hirsh doesn’t know what else the city can do to increase the percentage.
“We’ve been stuck on an overall 65 percent vaccination for a long time. When you load the recovery factor, it is less than 50%.
“This is a very important moment for public health,” Hirsh said.
Garcia the positive.
Since Get Boosted began five weeks ago, 24,000 citizens have gained a COVID vaccine, adding plenty of boosters, at two hundred sites across the state.
“These other 24,000 people are more before the holidays. This is wonderful news,” Garcia said.
The program will run through the end of this year and Worcester clinics will be held at three locations: the YMCA central branch, 766 Main Street, from 11 a. m. to 7 p. m. on Dec. 5, 12 and 19; Worcester Public Library, 3 Salem Square, from noon to five p. m. , Dec. 3, 10 and 17; and Belmont A. M. E. Zion Church, fivefive Illinois St. , Dec. 9, time TBD.
Children 6 months through four years of age can get a COVID-19 vaccine, and any child five years of age and older can get the updated vaccine or booster.
An appointment is not necessary, but some places might inspire registration. Vaccinations and boosters are free and no identification or health insurance is required.
“Politicization” and “alternative facts,” Hirsh said, have helped erode public health credibility, making fighting COVID-19 with proven science a difficult task.
“The politicization of vaccination and the total struggle for public physical exercise that we are waging has been so altered by the facts of choice and revisionist history, that now in many tactics we have been discredited in the realms of public physical exercise,” Hirsh said.
Public reactions and long hours have affected those on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19. About a third of the city’s public has retired or gone to other jobs in the past six months, Hirsh said. .
“A sense of exhaustion and also frustration, because efforts aren’t rewarded,” Hirsh said of the department’s schedule for more than two years of 18 hours of painting a day, seven days a week. “A lot of what we’ve done has been painted, it was thankless work. “
Garcia’s view is that he understands people’s frustrations, but under pressure that the public fitness network is doing everything it can to increase citizens’ access to COVID-19 vaccines.
The virus has caused more than a million deaths nationwide, according to the CDC.
The Get Boosted program, Garcia said, is the newest example of the effort for citizens.
“Anything we can do for convenience and availability (of vaccines), we will. This is the way. “
Contact Henry Schwan at henry. schwan@telegram. com. Follow him on Twitter@henrytelegram