Daily US Times: Pick-up truck drivers motor up to a white trailer in a parking lot on Fallon Paiute-Shoshone land in Nevada’s high desert and within a few moments they are handed forms to sign, jabbed with Covid-19 vaccine and sent on their way. These mobile vaccination units are deployed ti boost immunity.
The pop-up clinic 60 miles east of Reno is one of 28 locations in the state where the Federal Emergency Management Agency has dispatched mobile coronavirus vaccination units to ensure people in far-flung rural areas and one stop-light towns can get inoculated.
It is one of the tactics US health officials are using across the country to counter waning interest in vaccinations against the coronavirus. In tiny towns, ballparks, churches, strip clubs and even marijuana dispensaries, officials are setting up shop and offering incentives to entice people as the country struggles to reach herd immunity.
Health officials in Nevada acknowledge they are unlikely to hit their initial goal of vaccinating 75% of the population believed necessary to reach herd immunity.
Two FEMA mobile vaccination trailers have meandered through Nevada to towns without clinics, pharmacies or other vaccination sites, giving nurses, doctors and National Guardsmen a first-hand look at rural and tribal communities where finding vaccinations has been difficult for residents.
Peggy Franklin, a volunteer nurse who has traveled alongside a FEMA trailer to Fallon, Alamo, Panaca and other towns, said: “That’s our philosophy: it doesn’t make any difference if there are two (people) nor 200.”
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