A Haverhill pharmacy is among the first allowed to vaccinate eligible residents as part of the COVID-19 Centers for Disease Control Pharmacy Partnership announced yesterday.
Residents, including health care workers and first responders, who are eligible to receive a vaccine in Gov. Charlie Baker’s first phase will be able to schedule appointments online this week at Walgreens, 68 S. Main St., in the Bradford section of Haverhill.
No other Haverhill locations were immediately mentioned, but Walgreens and CVS are among 15 locations statewide joining the new federal partnership sharing 10,000 vaccine doses per week. Other communities are Greenfield, Fall River, Salem, South Yarmouth, Pittsfield, Lee, Holden, Gardner, Hyannis, Mashpee, Somerset, Fairhaven, Saugus and Danvers.
A mass vaccination site also opens at Fenway Park launches Feb. 1 as the second mass vaccination site in Massachusetts, following Gillette Stadium, for eligible populations.
At first, the home of the Boston Red Sox will be equipped to administer 500 vaccines per day and will scale up to more than 1,000 per day. It will continue to operate as a mass vaccination site “through the beginning of baseball season in early April,” Baker’s office said, while state officials work with city leaders to find a longer-term vaccine site in Boston.
Elected officials and public health advocates have been pushing the Baker administration to make regional equity a central focus in its COVID response, particularly for testing and vaccine infrastructure.
The second phase, tentatively aimed to begin sometime next month, will broaden eligibility to include individuals with two or more comorbidities as well as employees in early education, K-12 education, transit, grocery stores and retail, utilities, food and agriculture, sanitation, public works and public health.
Baker previously pushed adults 75 years old and older ahead in line toward the beginning of Phase Two. The federal government is now recommending that states first vaccinate adults 65 and older, but the Baker administration has not indicated how it will adopt that guidance.
In another section of the multi-step expansion released Tuesday, the Baker administration launched a Hospital Depot Initiative aimed at using hospitals, including Lawrence General Hospital, to help funnel doses to smaller medical practices.
WHAV staff contributed to this report.