Orange County vaccination efforts undaunted by J&J pause

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. – The pause in use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is doing little to slow Orange County’s vaccination efforts.

“The Johnson & Johnson vaccine that we have should not affect distribution in our county, because we were not doing to begin with that many Johnson & Johnson,” Dr. Raul Pino from the Florida Department of Health in Orange County said.

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Pino said the county still has 30,000 doses of the J&J vaccine that it is holding onto until a decision is made about whether it should be distributed again.

At the same time, Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings announced a slew of new opportunities for people to make appointments to get vaccinated.

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The mayor announced the next location for the county’s mobile COVID-19 vaccination program would be at the Silver Star Park Gymnasium at 2801 N. Apopka Vineland Road in Orlando, offering the Pfizer vaccine.

The site will be open from Monday, April 19 to Friday, April 23.

Monday through Thursday will be by appointment only. Appointments for the site can be made here.

On Friday, April 23 the gymnasium will be a walk-up site starting at 9 a.m. and will close once all the doses have been administered. The county said 1,000 vaccines will be offered each day.

On Friday morning at 9 a.m. for the mass vaccination site at the Orange County Convention Center. Appointments can be made at ocf.net/vaccine.

“I’m told that there will be some 17,000 potential appointments, that will be made available,” Demings said.

Demings also said the FEMA-backed site at Valencia College West Campus will be offering the Pfizer vaccine while the J&J single-dose shot was on hold. The state said Wednesday it was still working on a plan to make that.

“They anticipate up to 5000 walk-ups per day and we’re told that the availability is going well,” Demings said.

Despite these ongoing vaccination efforts, the mayor said that the county was still seeing an increased positivity rate.

“The 14-day positivity rate is still increasing. It is now 7.1% and that’s not going in the right direction. One month ago on March the 15th our 14-day positivity rate was hovering around 5%,” Demings said. “We cannot let up. in terms of getting people inoculated. At this time, the Coronavirus is still very much alive in our community.”

Even with that increased positivity rate, the mayor showed some optimism in his promise to start easing some masking and social distancing restrictions, teasing a bigger announcement to come.

“We have continued to dialogue. We have continued to work with epidemiologists and experts here in the area who have done research. We’ve continued to work with our local department of health and Dr. Pino, and likely sometime next week we will announce a plan of action going forward about what we can do as the virus continues to affect us here in this community. So, next week,” he said.

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