Public health suspends traveling clinics

A vaccine clinic held on November 18 at the Platte Valley Community Center may be the last traveling clinic for the foreseeable future. 

During the December 7 meeting of the Board of Carbon County Commissioners (BOCCC), Amanda Brown, Nurse Manager for Carbon County Public Health, provided the board with an update on vaccine progress in the county which included the suspension of traveling clinics.

“We have been getting a lot of questions on whether we’re going to be doing any more traveling clinics for Covid and, at this time, I don’t have any plans to. I’m trying to get vaccines to the clinics that are in the other communities instead of me traveling around every month because I don’t have the staff or the time to go and only have five (or) ten people show up,” said Brown. “So, I’m trying to make sure we’re doing it the best way to get people the vaccine that they need but not have me being the only one offering it.”

According to Brown, low vaccine clinic turnout wasn’t the only issue Carbon County Public Health had been dealing with recently. She added her office would, for the time being, cease offering doses of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine.

“As of right now, I’m not going to be offering the J&J anymore. We had a lot of wastage where we would open a vial and give one dose and we’d have to toss the rest,” Brown said. “Right now, we’re sending people to Rock Springs or Laramie if they want that one specifically but I do have all the other options available.”

In recent days, the Centers for Disease Control has expressed their support for the two-dose Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech (Pfizer) vaccines over the J&J vaccine. The J&J vaccine is a viral vector vaccine, which uses a modified version of a different virus to instruct the body’s muscle cells to produce a spike protein similar to the one found on the COVID-19 virus. The Moderna and Pfzier vaccines, meanwhile, use mRNA to produce a spike protein.

As of December 20, Wyoming residents had received a total of 606,806 doses of the J&J, Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

In lieu of traveling vaccine clinics, Brown told the commissioners her office had been holding walk-in vaccine clinics at their Rawlins office from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. every Tuesday.

“Those have been pretty steady. So we’ll probably continue those through the end of the month,” said Brown. “We’ll see what happens next month, if we need to continue those or not but it seems to work pretty well for people.”

The Board of Carbon County Commissioners will have met on December 21.

The next meeting of the Board of Carbon County Commissioners will be at 9 a.m. on January 4 at the Carbon Building - Courthouse Annex in Rawlins.