INSIDE BOSTON'S MAJOR LEAGUE VACCINE ROLLOUT

BLOOMBERG

In the past week, the U.S. reached an average of 2 million Covid-19 vaccine doses administered daily. That’s about 25 doses per 100 people since the beginning of the vaccination campaign mid-December, according to Bloomberg estimates.

One of the main instruments of this expedited rollout: mass vaccination centers. These large-scale facilities, scores of which have opened nationwide since January, can deliver several thousand shots per day while still allowing for social distancing among those getting vaccinated. Centralized locations also ease the storage challenges associated with the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which have a demanding cold chain and need ultra-cold freezers.

“When you think of the cost and effort to set up proper storage and all that, it’s much smarter to do larger sites rather than smaller sites,” said Tim Rowe CEO of CIC Health, a nine-month-old company that runs Covid testing and vaccination facilities throughout New England. “We decided to focus on setting up very, very large sites to get economies of scale, and that drove us to places that were already built to have very large numbers of people come,” said Rowe.

In Boston, as in many cities, giant sports venues supplied the best options. Gillette Stadium, home of the National Football League’s New England Patriots, opened on Jan. 18 as the first stadium-based mass vaccination site in North America; it’s now administering 6,000 shots a day. On Feb. 1 it was joined by Fenway Park, where Major League Baseball’s Red Sox play. The ballpark can handle 1,200 daily vaccinations. Since the two sites started operating, 168,000 shots have been given, representing 9% of all Massachusetts vaccinations.

But mass vaccine sites bring their own logistical challenges and tradeoffs. Juggling daily appointments for thousands of people can crash websites and strain phone lines, and those who are the most in need often need assistance to secure a spot. The sites themselves can be difficult to access, especially for the elderly, disabled or homebound. As a closer look inside these stadiums reveals, managing the crowds and safely guiding them through the inoculation process takes a team effort.

Accessibility is more of a challenge at Gillette Stadium. The 68,000-seat stadium is located in the town of Foxborough, 35 minutes away from the center of Boston. While the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority launched a pilot in 2019 connecting the stadium with Boston’s commuter rail network, that service is on hold until May 2021. So if you’re going to get your shot at the stadium, you’ll probably have to drive there, like Hannah McDuffie, a Boston-based physical therapist.

McDuffie got her first shot at Gillette on the first week the site opened, and returned for her second dose on Feb. 19. “From when I got in line outside to when I left the site, it was about an hour total,” McDuffie wrote in an interview over Instagram. “This included waiting in line, two checkpoints verifying my eligibility, getting the vaccine and sitting in a 15-minute observation window after the shot.”

One-Way Systems

Both sites use efficient one-way systems to help facilitate social distancing

The vaccinations themselves are located in the 19-year-old stadium’s 40,000-square-foot Putnam Club, a vast glass-walled space with three-story-high ceilings and large lounges and meeting halls ideal for social distancing. Currently, 125 staffers operate 60 vaccination stations there.

Fenway Park is a different story. Built in 1912, the ballpark is a smaller, quirkier venue, with pillars scattered all around the third-base concourse, which has been converted into a vaccination site. Harder to organize, Fenway is easier to access for most city residents, as it’s close to the city center, in the predominantly white Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood, and well served by subway, light rail and bus routes. With 12 vaccination stations, Fenway can only inoculate a tenth of the crowds that Gillette can handle, Rowe estimates.

When Kaya Castillo got her first dose at Fenway Park in January, the appointment was the first time she’d ever stepped foot in the ballpark. “I was very unsure of how it would be set up for vaccinations,” wrote Castillo, a registered behavioral technician who lives about 20 minutes away, in an interview via Instagram. “But they did an incredible job at keeping it organized, socially distanced and not overwhelming at all.”

Vaccination

The jab itself is just one part of a process revolving around the vaccination unit. For each person vaccinated, four staffers are needed, says Rodrigo Martinez, CIC Health’s Chief Marketing and Experience Officer. Vaccinators administer the shots, while others prepare the doses — the bar of a Sam Adams brewpub hosts this phase of the process at Fenway.

To manage and operate both Boston-area venues, CIC Health hired DMSE Sports, a sports event company. In pre-Covid times, DMSE organized events like the Boston Marathon, but it suffered heavy losses in 2020, laying off half of its permanent staff. “It sort of wiped us out,” said DMSE president Dave McGillivray. He was eager to bring his company’s skills to the fight against the pandemic. “We have a vested interest in bringing our industry back, which is a mass gathering industry,” he said. “We wanna work ourselves out of this job.”

Each venue also has an emergency health team, in case someone has an allergic reaction. A private ambulance company, Cataldo Ambulances, provides about 40 staffers for Fenway, mostly vaccinators and RNs, says company vice-president Daniel Hoffenberg. The two groups of contractors had never worked together, and few had prior experience with vaccination facilities. “We sort of built a plane while we were flying it,” Hoffenberg said.

CIC Health uses the two venues rent-free: During Superbowl week, the NFL announced it would make all of its stadiums available to help support the vaccine effort, and a host of Major League Baseball franchises have made similar arrangements to turn ballparks into Covid-fighting facilities. But the approach of baseball season, and the return of a limited number of fans to these parks, will put an end to some stadium vaccination programs. In Boston, for example, the vaccinators of Fenway will move to the Hynes Convention Center in time for the Red Sox’ Opening Day on April 1.

Is This Our Best Shot?

The emphasis in the U.S. on setting up large mass vaccination sites has drawn some criticism.

Sites that are drive-through-only and those, like Gillette Stadium, that are difficult to reach without a car have been blamed for exacerbating the racial disparities in vaccination rates seen nationwide, including Massachusetts. White residents of Massachusetts, for example, have received 12 times more doses than African-American residents and 15 more than Latinx residents, according to the Vaccine Equity Now! Coalition, a civil rights organization that pressed Governor Charlie Baker on the issue in mid-February. A Bloomberg analysis of demographic data showed that Hispanic residents of Massachusetts make up 11.8% of the state population but only 5.2% of the known vaccinated population. The stadium sites are also not located in the communities that have borne the brunt of the pandemic.

To help address this, CIC Health recently took over and expanded the Reggie Lewis Center at Roxbury Community College, a vaccination site that the City of Boston had been operating in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Roxbury. It opened on Feb. 25 and will eventually be able to administer 2,500 shots a day, according to CIC Health. The introduction of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, a single-shot inoculation that doesn’t require ultra-cold storage, should also help close the vaccine gap by allowing neighborhood pharmacies and other smaller sites to provide a greater share of vaccinations.

But for the early stage of the vaccination campaign, as public health authorities work to overcome vaccine hesitancy among certain groups, pro sports venues have another key advantage over less-charismatic spaces: They can tap into pre-existing fanbases.

Accordingly, both the Gillette and Fenway sites prominently feature selfie stations, where the inoculated are encouraged to strike a pose with the playing field in the background. As jubilant vaccination selfies proliferate across social media, the challenge of convincing others to get their shots may ease.

Jerome Murphy, 70 years old, took his first trip to Fenway Park in 1959; he remembers “seeing Ted Williams swatting away,” he said over Instagram. Later, he held tickets for World Series games in 1967 and playoffs in 2003. “Loved every game I’ve attended.”

The first Covid shot he got on February 24. “Absolutely one of my best Fenway experiences.” He’ll get his second dose there on March 17.