No more first COVID-19 doses at FEMA sites soon. MDC, others will only give second dose
Florida residents soon will no longer be able to get a first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine from any South Florida FEMA-supported site, which includes Miami Dade College’s North Campus, which has been vaccinating thousands of people a day.
Starting sometime next week, FEMA-supported state-run sites will stop giving first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines and transition to administering only second doses, FEMA spokesman Mike Jachles said in a press conference Thursday.
This includes the main site at the MDC North Campus and the two satellite sites currently in Cutler Bay and Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood, which opened Thursday and run until March 23.
“The important message here is if you need a vaccine and you meet the criteria, do not wait,” said Jachles, “because by mid-week next week, we will transition to second vaccines only. So you cannot get the first vaccines at the FEMA-supported sites.”
Jachles said this was always the agency’s plan to administer first doses or the one-dose series Johnson & Johnson vaccine for three weeks and then switch to giving second doses for another three weeks.
“When these sites were set up, we had an end date that was scheduled. So we had three weeks of the Pfizer vaccine and we’ll do three weeks of the second dose Pfizer vaccine to achieve that vision,” he said.
After the Cutler Bay and Liberty City satellite sites close next week, FEMA will reopen its first set of satellite sites in Florida City and Sweetwater to begin administering the first round of second doses for one week. Then, FEMA will resume the same rotation of satellite sites for the next several weeks for second doses only at the sites that were open at North Miami Beach and Miami Springs.
Ronselli Park Youth Center in Sweetwater, which is at 250 SW 114th Ave., and Florida City Youth Activity Center, at 650 NW Fifth Ave., will be open to administer second doses.
He did not give a specific date on when the transition will occur next week but it could change depending on supply and public demand.
This announcement came after FEMA had announced it would stop administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which began Wednesday.
As of 3 p.m. Thursday afternoon, 1,547 Pfizer vaccines had been administered at Miami Dade College’s North Campus, 290 at the Liberty City site and 511 at the Cutler Bay site.
And at Hialeah’s one-day pop-up vaccine site at Amelia Earhart Park, which was the only one giving out Johnson & Johnson vaccines on Thursday, 203 shots out of their 250 daily vaccine allotment were administered by mid-afternoon.
In Miami-Dade, 575,496 people have been administered at least one dose of Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer or Moderna, according to Thursday’s DOH report. Of those, about 18% of people identified as a person of color. People aged 65 to 74 have received the most vaccines in Miami-Dade.
“That was the intent of this program, was to do two weeks of the J&J and then transition to the Pfizer vaccines, which will continue until the beginning of next week,” said Jachles.
To date, Jachles said 61,382 vaccines had been administered at the FEMA-supported sites in Florida. FEMA has administered 1.3% of the 4,570,538 vaccines given in Florida.
This story was originally published March 18, 2021 at 5:13 PM.
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