Baltimore City will administer COVID-19 vaccination booster shots starting the week of Sept. 20 in accordance with new CDC guidelines, city officials said Thursday.
Like the first vaccination campaigns last winter, doses will be rolled out in phases that prioritize health care workers, first responders and public safety workers, Health Commissioner Dr. Letitia Dzirasa said at a news conference.
“The health department is in the process of planning both a semi-permanent location for booster doses, as well as setting up vaccine access points in low vaccination coverage areas to provide those booster doses,” she said.
She said the semi-permanent booster shot facility will likely be similar to the city’s mobile vaccination clinics, which operate in 20 to 25 sites a week. Those clinics will also receive booster doses, she said.
The CDC released updated booster shot guidelines Wednesday, which recommend booster shots for all Americans who received a two-dose COVID-19 8 months after their second dose. U.S. health experts are still researching whether people who received the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine should receive a booster; Dzirasa said it’s likely that boosters will be required for one-shot vaccine doses.
The new guidelines come amid nationwide spikes in COVID-19 cases, which Dzirasa and health experts across the U.S. have attributed to the highly contagious delta variant.
Baltimore’s new case count has risen 471% over the last four weeks; the positivity rate is at 3.1%, a jump of 365% over the same time period. Though city ICU beds and acute care beds are at 85% and 88% respectively, new deaths are still low, mostly due to vaccines, Dzirasa said, and the large majority of hospitalized patients are unvaccinated.
