PA On Track To Vaccinate All School Staff By End Of March

PENNSYLVANIA — Some 6,500 teachers have been vaccinated across Pennsylvania thus far with the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, as the state's new effort to immunize school employees gets underway. State officials say they are on track to completely vaccinate all school staff by the end of March.

The state opened 10 more intermediate unit vaccination clinics on Friday, bringing the total number of sites operational up to 20. The remaining eight are expected to open on Saturday.

"The light at the end of the tunnel is getting a lot brighter," Acting Secretary of Education Noe Ortega said Friday, noting that the effort would help more schools reopen to in-person learning.

The sites, coordinated by the Pennsylvania National Guard, have communicated directly with public and private school districts to get school employees registered for tests. As of Friday, there have been 240,000 respondents to those surveys just from within the K-12 school employee population. Childcare workers are being registered separately through Rite Aid, Topco, and Walmart, and those registration numbers were not immediately available Friday.

Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency director Randy Padfield said that the plan was for these clinics to operate for anywhere from one to nine days, depending on number of school employees registered at each site.

Currently, all sites are meeting their "expected throughput," or the total number of anticipated vaccines administered, per day, Padfield said. This ranges from 500 to 1,000 per site.

The state has not received more doses of Johnson & Johnson since its initial allocation of roughly 94,000. However, many more doses are expected in the coming weeks.

"We may not need the entire Johnson & Johnson allotment to finish (teacher vaccinations)," Padfield said.

Padfield added that the significant infrastructure that has been built up around these intermediate unit sites can be utilized for other clinics, once all school employee vaccinations have been completed.

"We know we've built tremendous capability across the state, and we're just waiting for the vaccine to help us realize that capability," he said. He reiterated that plans are in place to open up more mass vaccination clinics once the supply is increased, and that the state expects to soon be at a point where vaccine supply is no longer the limiting factor.

These early shots are focusing on teachers who work with the most vulnerable student populations, including teachers of pre-K and elementary students, students with disabilities, English learners, and other at-risk students

Teachers of older students, as well as other school staff like bus drivers, janitors, and food service workers, will be next. Because the state is dependent on a limited supply, it's not yet clear exactly when the next phase of vaccinating teachers of older students will begin.

For full information about getting a coronavirus vaccine in Pennsylvania, visit Patch's information hub.