McKee visits Monsignor Gadoury during city’s weekly vaccinations
WOONSOCKET — Estelle Legare and Carol Molyneaux of North Smithfield, both 81, finally had appointments and were able to get vaccinated at the Holy Trinity Parish school at Park Square without difficulty, as Gov. Daniel J. McKee saw firsthand during his visit there Thursday afternoon.
“I was saying, ‘What’s taking so long?’” Legare said on her way into the Woonsocket and North Smithfield vaccination site with Molyneaux. “All the 65-year-olds are getting their shots, and what’s happening to me?”
The senior called the North Smithfield town hall to find out about getting a COVID-19 vaccination and got scheduled for an appointment at the parish school along with her friend, Molyneaux.
“She and I think it is high time we got vaccinated,” Legare said.
Molyneaux had been waiting for a call to get the vaccination from her town and noted “they called me Monday morning” with an appointment at the school on Thursday.
McKee toured the municipality-operated vaccination site with Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt and state Rep. Robert Phillips of Woonsocket.
“What we have here in Woonsocket is we have our pod, our point of distribution, which is a collaboration between North Smithfield and the City of Woonsocket,” Baldelli-Hunt said after the group spent about a half-hour inside the site meeting its volunteers and organizers, as well as residents getting vaccinated.
Each Thursday, the city vaccinates 290 Woonsocket residents at the site, and another 80 North Smithfield residents are vaccinated from the site’s partner town, Baldelli-Hunt explained.
“We’ve collaborated for the purpose of utilizing the volunteers, the public safety officials and we have multiple check points going throughout the entire building – it’s an extremely smooth process and we are just very fortunate that we are able to vaccinate our residents here and in North Smithfield,” the mayor said.
Next Thursday will be the fourth vaccination day held at the site. From
there, the cities will switch to giving the already inoculated residents their second shots of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for the following four weeks, Baldelli-Hunt explained.
“It’s been very well-received,” Baldelli-Hunt said, noting the vaccination operation has been the most complimented operation of her 7 years as mayor. “Chief Paul Shatraw, EMA Director Tim Walsh and Chief (David) Chartier from North Smithfield, they are the ones who have executed this distribution, and it’s been a well-oiled
machine and it is going extremely smooth and we are just proud of the operation.”
Chief Shatraw said the site has seen no problems with the Moderna vaccine. It features a 15 minute and 30 minute post-vaccination waiting areas to check for any reactions that might crop up.
“We have a medical team that is inside to monitor the people after that, and we have had no instances,” Shatraw said.
Everyone is preregistered in advance of showing up, and the seniors are also given their appointment for their second shot so they know they will get it, Baldelli-Hunt noted.
The site has 12 vaccination tables for giving the shots,
but Shatraw said two are kept in reserve and have not been needed to the manage the location’ s flow of seniors getting shots thus far.
There are also Spanish-speaking volunteers to help people move through the site’s stations, Baldelli-Hunt told media members outside the site after the tour.
McKee said he was not surprised to see the site operating as “a well-oiled machine and getting the work done.”
The governor said he also was not surprised to find “volunteers and professionals that have been given the opportunity to really help people out during a pandemic in places like this in Woonsocket and North Smithfield.”
The communities’ partnership was “an example of why it is so important to be working with our municipal leaders because of the resources that they have and the actual connection that they have with the people of that community,” McKee said. “And what you see is a really uplifting spirit that the mayor has been able to put together here in Woonsocket as well as the other communities that you visited with me.”
“I think it is important and we are already talking about,
as you heard me talking about teachers and school staff members, we are already working out a strategy where Woonsocket will be taking the lead when we get the program up and running, which is not too long, a couple of weeks from now,” McKee said.
McKee expects that teachers and school staff members from the two communities will also be vaccinated at Holy Trinity School under an expanded use of the site during the week that is now being worked out.
“As long as the mayor and the municipal leaders want it, we want to keep on moving to the next level, which is the teachers and the staff members in the schools because we want the students back in the classroom where they belong,” McKee said.
Students need to be in school for many reasons, both from an educational perspective as well as for emotional reasons, and it is also important for young parents who “are going to be able to go work,” he added.
McKee predicted the state’s supply of coronavirus vaccines will be increasing in the weeks ahead and that makes having working sites to deliver them all the more
important.
“That is what I have been saying over and over again, build the capacity in advance of actually having the supply and that way we can make sure that the shots get in the arm as quickly as possible because that is our avenue, that is the avenue we actually need to take to open our schools and get our businesses back in business and keep us safe,” McKee said.
“So partnering with the municipalities is a very important part of the partnership between the state and local communities and the people who live in our cities and towns,” he added.
Eventually, McKee explained there will be Rhode Island Department of Health state sites that will be regionalized and also Department of Health municipal regional sites that will be set up, like the one in the works for the former Sears Store at Walnut Hill Plaza.
“So we are going to empower everybody we can to get the shots in the arms,” McKee explained. “It’s not a preference of one over the other; it’s partnering with everybody in the state to get this job done.”
Baldelli-Hunt said she sees the Holy Trinity Parish
as continuing to operate for the next 5 weeks as the rest of the senior vaccination program and the school staff inoculations are completed.
The city would then transition over to the Sears site from that point on, she explained.
In all about 1,400 vaccinations would be needed to inoculate teachers and school staff in both Woonsocket and North Smithfield, and those could be completed at Holy Trinity by opening up additional vaccination days during the week beyond the current Thursdays operation.
“We will continue to try to organize that so we can utilize days that are different than the Thursdays in order to get those shots in the arms so we can get our kids back in the classroom where they belong,” Baldelli-Hunt said. “And so this is a way to do it in one full swoop.”
McKee also pointed to the need to reach out to members of minority communities and those not aware of the importance of getting vaccinated as the statewide vaccination efforts continue.
“We are doing that and we are going to continue to doing that until every person in the State of Rhode Island that is eligible for a shot gets
a shot,” McKee said.
“I think it is a role of leaders, including Rep. Phillips and others, to make sure that is a priority, but it is also a priority to be put in the hands of our civic leaders as well,” he said. “This is a crisis of health, economy, and education right now that is all hands on deck. So it is everybody’s responsibility to communicate with the people in their life, with the people in the community to make sure they know that getting a vaccination, getting a shot in the arm saves lives and keeps people out of the hospital,” McKee said.
As they left the school with shots in their arms Thursday, Legare and Molyneaux had only praise for what they had experienced.
“It was wonderful, everything was wonderful and the people were very helpful, everything went well,” Legare said.
“Ditto,” Molyneaux added. “It was wonderful to see people give up their time for something like that.”
The seniors said they have their appointments for their next shots and laughed about the date. “It’s April 1, April Fools Day,” Legare said.