Galveston County to close mass vaccination site

Galveston County officials announced Tuesday that its mass COVID-19 vaccination site at Walter Hall Park will no longer be available for appointments beginning May 1, saying the site has largely accomplished its goals.

Philip Keiser, the county’s local health authority, characterized the closing of the League City site as a milestone for the county’s relative success in getting as many as 4,000 doses of vaccine out per day. The site will continue to fill appointments for second doses through next week before shutting down for good.

While the state’s calculations differ, Keiser said more than 50 percent of Galveston County’s residents have been fully vaccinated. He credited County Judge Mark Henry for spearheading the county’s involvement in setting up the Walter Hall Park site.

“It’s mission accomplished,” Keiser said. “We set up Walter Hall Park to meet the the great demand for vaccine, which we knew we were going to have. And the goal was to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as we could, to meet that demand. We’ve been doing that for three months now.”

The site was open five days per week and appointments began dwindling in recent weeks. Ever since the state made every adult eligible for a vaccine effective March 29, demand at the mass site has declined as doctors, hospitals and pharmacies got more doses, Keiser said. The county will now shift its focus to transferring vaccine doses to local providers such as primary care physicians, as well as doing outreach to communities in the county where fewer people are vaccinated.

“We’re going to be looking into starting walk-up clinics,” Keiser said. “We’re looking at potential increased demand with schools. We’ve already had some discussion and we’ll be meeting with school superintendents to talk about ways we can get vaccine into schools when we get that go-ahead from the (U.S. Food and Drug Administration).”

Keiser noted that there are some areas of the county — parts of League City and Dickinson — that have below-average vaccination rates. Getting several hundred people per day in those areas will be crucial, he said.

“We recognize that we’re into the hard part of (the vaccination effort), which is getting people that are either reluctant or afraid or have transportation problems or just aren’t aware of everything that goes on,” he said. “We’ve got to really start looking at those folks.”