Federal government to open four new vaccine sites in Florida, including one in Miami.

The federal government soon will open four COVID-19 vaccination sites across the state that will give thousands of shots a day and expand the vaccination effort to minority communities.

The sites will open at Miami Dade Community College North Campus, at Valencia College West Campus in Orlando, at Tampa Greyhound Track and at Gateway Mall in Jacksonville, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Friday.

The sites will operate 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. seven days a week starting March 3. To register, call the designated phone number for the county or visit myvaccine.fl.gov.

Each of the four new sites will administer 2,000 vaccines per day. Each site also will come with two mobile units that will branch out into underserved and minority communities to handle an additional 1,000 vaccines a day — meaning the overall effort will bring 12,000 more doses per day to Florida, officials said.

DeSantis said the new allotments supplement the federal government’s weekly allocation to Florida, which totaled 366,000 doses this week.

The sites are a partnership between the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Florida Department of Health, the Florida Division of Emergency Management and the Florida National Guard. Florida will supply the nurses, and the federal government will handle the infusion of new vaccine.

The announcement came weeks after DeSantis criticized President Joseph Biden’s plan to distribute vaccines at FEMA sites.

“I saw some of this stuff Biden’s putting out, that he’s going to create these FEMA camps, I can tell you, that’s not necessary in Florida,” DeSantis said at the time. “All we need is more vaccine. Just get us more vaccine.”

On Friday, state officials clarified.

Jared Moskowitz, director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, who has overseen the pandemic response, said the governor always said the sites would be welcome if they brought additional vaccine into Florida. The concern was the federal government coming in and using the state’s allocation, he said.

“We’ve never had a distribution problem. It’s always a supply problem,” Moskowitz said. “He didn’t want to disturb the distribution model” but always wanted additional vaccine. “He’s been very clear since Day 1: If federal sites that came had vaccine, we wanted them.”

DeSantis said Thursday: “My initial recommendation, as many of you know, was to just send us the doses because we have the infrastructure. They do want to do it through FEMA. So we said, ‘Look, if it’s additional doses for Florida, we want to participate because we want to get as many doses as we can.’ So we hope to be able to get some of those here in Florida.”