Hub takes vax effort on the road in Roxbury
The city’s mobile vaccination site has begun putting shots in arms, starting with 100 vaccines at a Boston public housing project for seniors in Roxbury.
“This is the beginning of a mobile effort that the city’s going to roll out to bring vaccines to people’s homes, to where people live,” Boston Health Chief Marty Martinez told reporters outside the Martin Luther King Towers apartment buildings in Roxbury on Friday morning.
This “final prong” of what Martinez has repeatedly called the city’s fourpronged approach to COVID-19 vaccines started Friday with 100 shots for residents at the Boston Housing Authority property for elderly or disabled Bostonians. The other prongs are the mass vaccination site, neighborhood clinics and the start of priority-group clinics.
“There’s been so much talk about mass vaccination and Fenway and all the big places — and they’re super important — but this is how we’re going to make sure that those folks who can’t get to those locations or who need greater access get it,” Martinez said outside the towers on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
People who live or work in low-income senior housing developments are now eligible for the vaccine as part of the latest step in the state’s rollout, spurring efforts such as this. Further, activists have said the rollout has been unequal, with more white people by population in Boston getting the shot than Black people and particularly Hispanic people.
Martinez said this is a good way to get to elderly residents of color.
“It’s really really important that we lower barriers,” he said. “This is going to be a key part of that.”
This mobile vaccination clinic will move to a different spot for another day next week.
Lydia Agro of the Boston Housing Authority added, “This is what equity looks like.”
“They can’t get to a mass vax site” otherwise in many cases, she said, adding that the BHA has about 4,000 apartments reserved for elderly or disabled people. “We’re really happy to be doing this today.”
This mobile vaccination effort — which Martinez has said isn’t going to be the only one in the city — is a partnership with Boston EMS.
“We said we want to be part of the effort,” EMS Chief James Hooley said in an echo of what the EMS union told the Herald last week.
Martin Luther King Towers resident Leon McCray, the president of the tenant association, said said he’s happy to see people signing up, and that this was also an opportunity for the BHA residents to get a general health check-in.
“It’s good to see folks come out, and maybe it’ll spark a change that spreads around — just like the virus,” McCray said with a chuckle. “Every individual makes up the whole body, and if you have one part that’s sick, it all is going to be sick, too.”