Brevard tapped for vaccine at Publix
The Publix pharmacy vaccination program has been expanded to Brevard County, one of many new counties announced Tuesday by Gov. Ron DeSantis, including a massive expansion in Palm Beach County.
Brevard joins Volusia, Flagler and Marion counties in Central Florida that will be offering the vaccine by appointment, but it’s
not yet available in Orange, Osceola, Lake, Seminole, Sumter or Polk.
All 67 Publix locations in Palm Beach County as well as seven in Martin and two in Monroe, in Islamorada and Key West, will begin taking reservations on Wednesday and begin giving
shots on Thursday.
Brevard will add 22, and DeSantis said 32 in Lee County and seven in Charlotte County were also coming online.
The program targets those 65 and older at the grocery store
chain’s pharmacies.
“This is the first really large county that we’re doing, and it’s obviously a lot more stores,” DeSantis said from a Publix storefront in Jupiter in Palm Beach County. “We have confidence that this is a good system here, and we know that they’ll put the doses to good use.”
Palm Beach is the first mostly Democratic county to be part of the project. The expansion follows criticism that the program was previously only being offered in 12 counties across the state that were majority Republican, having been won by DeSantis in 2018 and President Trump in 2020.
But including Martin, Lee, Charlotte, Brevard and Monroe counties, 17 out of the 18 counties the Publix program is currently available were won by Republicans.
Some of the state’s largest counties, including Orange, Miami-Dade, Broward, Pinellas, Hillsborough and Duval, all of which were won either overwhelmingly or narrowly by Democrats in 2020, are still not included.
DeSantis said the Publix rollout was targeted for more rural counties without large hospital systems.
“We’re going to look for different ways to be able to get it into communities right now [so that in] all 67 counties, people have access to at least one site,” DeSantis said.
“Now obviously, there’s some counties where you have a lot of big hospital systems ... like Orlando and Miami Dade, but even the rural counties have at least one place where you can get the vaccine.”
That doesn’t explain why the dense, mostly urban Palm Beach has been included, however. DeSantis said the Publix program would be a “major force multiplier” for vaccines in the county.
DeSantis and Publix also have said the creation of the program has nothing to do with a $100,000 contribution from Publix’s political action committee to the Friends of Ron DeSantis PAC last month, the Ledger reported, as well as additional Publix PAC donations of $25,000 in November 2019 and January 2020.
The project started with a pilot program in Citrus, Hernando and Marion counties in which each location doled out 100 to 125 of the Moderna vaccine shots to those 65 and older who signed up through the Publix website.
It then expanded to five Panhandle counties, then St. Johns, Flagler and Volusia counties in northeast Florida and Collier County in southwest Florida.
With Tuesday’s addition of 147 more locations, now 252 Publix locations out of more than 750 statewide are going to be distributing the vaccine.
DeSantis said he and Palm Beach County leaders identified that 90% of the county’s senior population lived within 1.5 miles of a Publix pharmacy, and since the county is one of the highest in the state in terms of senior population, that the expansion made sense.
“The response has been uniformly positive ... because it’s convenient,” he said. “Not every senior is going to drive halfway across town or across the county to go to a drivethrough site. They need something that’s more convenient.”
Appointments can be made at www.publix.com/ covid-vaccine.
To date, the state has given the first shot of the vaccine to almost 700,000 seniors, and Florida has been getting around 265,000 shots each week from the federal government.
DeSantis said he’s optimistic the supply will increase as production increases and that the federal government will consider upping the supply to Florida, as 21% of the state is 65 and older.
He also brought up the in-progress Johnson & Johnson vaccine, a one-shot vaccine that has yet to be approved, but could mean potentially a much bigger supply to all the states by the end of February.
At that point, he said, he would expect he said to expand the shot program beyond his priority of senior citizens to younger recipients.