Reggie Lewis Center readies for vaccinations starting Monday

The Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center will open to the public for vaccinations on Monday, with the goal of providing thousands of shots per day in an area where residents sorely need them.

“We’ve been working feverishly to get the site ready,” Roxbury Community College President Valerie Roberson told the Herald, saying it’s only been about a month since the college began setting up the arena for the sizable operation.

Starting Monday, the community college will begin offering coronavirus vaccines to anyone eligible to get them who makes an appointment. That includes the various first responders, medical personnel and people who live in congregate settings who are in Phase 1 of the vaccine rollout, and people 75 years of age or older, the first group of people in Phase 2, which starts Monday.

Roberson said the mass vaccination site will start with a few hundred doses a day, but hopes to be scale up toward 3,000 a day  — if there’s the supply coming down to do so, which remains to be seen as the state and federal governments continue to build out the vaccine response.

Advocates have decried what they saw as a lack of vaccine access in minority neighborhoods, which have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. The Reggie Lewis Center aims to be a major resource for the people in heavily Black Roxbury, just a few blocks from Nubian Square and right near the Roxbury Crossing Orange Line stop, plus various bus routes.

“That’s one of the reasons why it was important for Roxbury Community College to be involved in this — it’s important for us as a community leader to play a part ” Roberson said, noting that areas like Roxbury are home to many front-line workers and people living in multigenerational housing. “We definitely want to ensure that they have as much access as possible.”

The site is a fitting place to encourage people to focus on their health — after all, it’s named after a Celtics guard and Northeastern University star who collapsed on the court in 1993 and died at age 27.

Roberson said that when the news began to come out that the center would be used for vaccinations — people began to show up this week in the hopes that there would be shots already available. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, but Roberson said she hopes that it’s indicative of the desire to get vaccinated.

“As a group, we certainly have had a less-than-comfortable relationship with the medical community,” Roberson, who’s Black, said, citing a distrust that goes back decades. “But I hope people will understand this is the only real solution — this is the only way out of the pandemic.”

She said she hopes the college’s students try to get registered as soon as they’re all able to: “They can get their vaccines and get back to studying in class.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3pBalD1