SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, April 29, 2021 (Gephardt Daily) — Gov. Spencer Cox held his weekly COVID-19 briefing Thursday morning, announcing that the state will now offer free mobile vaccination clinics for organizations of all types.
Cox said the aim now is to make getting the vaccine as easy as possible. He said mass vaccination sites will still be open, but health officials are shifting their approach to bring the vaccine directly to Utahns.
“Any type of organization, whether they are businesses or employers, community-based organizations or church groups, any organization that is interested can go to coronavirus.utah.gov and can request to host their own free mobile vaccination clinic, at their location,” Cox said.
“We will come to you, and at no cost to your organization. Right now we have plenty of doses available to support this initiative, in fact we are going to set aside about 25,000 prime doses from next week’s allocation, about one-third of the total prime doses next week specifically for this effort. We have the doses available and we are excited to be able to do this.”
He said the mobile clinics are ready to go and the initiative will begin right away.
“We have passed, and we knew this would happen, the point where supply starts to outweigh demand,” Cox said. “We are certainly there in the state of Utah so there is no excuse to not be able to get a vaccine, they are widely available and there are so many appointments available right now. I just can’t underscore this enough; while we are making progress on the numbers, we have been in a plateau for several weeks, we are still declining, but declining very, very slowly.
“The race against the virus is still real. The importance of tamping this virus down now while we have the upper hand is so critical for lots of reasons; to avoid the variants we are seeing across the country, to make sure we don’t have to go through this in a year again for any reason, and the only way, the only way to do that is for people to get vaccinated, we desperately need you to get vaccinated. If you don’t want to do this again, please please get vaccinated.”
To schedule a vaccine clinic, click here.
Other subjects Cox covered in his weekly briefing were:
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine
“The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is back, that’s something we are very excited about,” Cox said. “For many reasons that we have talked about in this forum before, the single dose really does give us the best chance of vaccinating people who are harder to reach whether it be by geography or personal schedules or maybe less likely for whatever reason to return for a second shot and even for those that don’t like needles we know that there is an extremely rare condition that can develop; none here in the state of Utah and this vaccine is extremely safe and so much safer than the coronavirus, we hope that people will not have any hesitancy to get this or any other vaccine.”
Vaccine equity
Cox noted that Utah has now administered more than 2.1 million doses of the vaccine, and more than 900,000 Utahns are fully immunized. He said 88% of Utahns age 70 and older have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 78% of those are fully vaccinated. Of those 65 and older, 86% have received at least one dose, and 75% are fully vaccinated, which is “significantly above” the national average in those age categories, Cox said.
Approximately 54% of eligible people in Utah have now received at least one dose of the vaccine. He said Asian adults have gone from 24.6% with at least one dose to over 39% with at least one dose over the past month and Hispanic adults have gone from 17.5% with at least one dose to over 31% with at least one dose, while Black adults have gone from 13.1% with at least one dose to over 21% with at least one dose. The Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander community has gone from 15.2% with at least one dose to over 21% with at least one dose. White adults are at 48.7% with at least one dose.
Cox said he himself is now fully vaccinated.
Transmission index
Cox said Beaver, Duchesne and Morgan counties are moving from the moderate to low transmission index, making 16 counties total now in that category; the largest number since the transmission index system began. Twelve counties are now in moderate and one, Grand County, is in the high transmission index. For more information on counties in each category, click here.
