As more smaller vaccination sites become available and interest in the vaccine wanes, several Florida counties are making plans to scale back their vaccination sites.
Maggie Hall with the Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County said when the sites first opened, there was big demand to vaccinate many people as quickly and efficiently as possible.
“As you have more availability of sites, there's less of a need for huge, larger site to be there to provide vaccines,” Hall said.
Now that vaccines are widely available at pharmacies and other community locations, the larger sites will begin consolidating operations this month.
Hall said they’ve also seen less demand for the vaccine.
“There is a softening of demand. It isn’t the huge demand we saw first with the seniors. But then again, there's a whole lot more vaccine available," she said. "Before that there was a huge demand, but not as many vaccines and now we've got a lot of vaccines.”
Pharmacies were ordered to allow walk-in vaccine appointments this week as President Joe Biden announced a new goal to administer at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine to 70% of American adults by the Fourth of July.
As of Wednesday, 14,981,650 doses in Florida have been administered of the three vaccines approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration. There's been a total of 9,037,042 people vaccinated, with 6,533,066 people having completed the full series.
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