Danvers Mass Vaccination Site To Give Final Shots By June 30

DANVERS, MA — Five months after it opened as one of the pillars of the state's hopes to vaccinate as many of its residents as quickly as possible against the coronavirus, the Danvers DoubleTree Hotel mass vaccination site will close at the end of June.

Gov. Charlie Baker said on Thursday that the Danvers site — along with the state's six other mass vaccination sites — will close within the next few weeks. The last day for the Danvers site is scheduled to be June 30.

The state's vaccination push will now shift to getting the vaccine-hesitant and hard-to-reach populations the shots through community-based efforts.

"The Commonwealth’s mass vaccination sites have jointly administered over 1.7 million doses and played an instrumental role in getting residents vaccinated," Gov. Baker's office said in a statement. "Today, Massachusetts is a nationwide leader in vaccination, with 79 percent of all adult residents and two-thirds of all residents having received at least one dose."

Though the administration said there are now over 900 locations where residents can get a shot, that was not the case in early February when the state prioritized Danvers and the other mass vaccination sites over community health centers for first-responders and those 75 years old and older.

"With the limited amount of doses we have and the incredible pressure we are under to get as many doses into people's arms as we possibly can as quickly as possible, following what has proved to be most successful in most other places in the country is to use very big sites to push big
numbers (of shots)," Baker said at the time.

Mass vaccination website outages and appointment shortages created great frustration in the early weeks of the Danvers site as residents traveled across the state for time slots and battled over the timeline of the rollout.

At the time, Baker had just lifted the 9:30 p.m. curfew for non-essential businesses and stay-at-home advisory for residents. Virus rates were just beginning to fall from the high of the 8.0 positive test rate in early January when the state reported 2,400 patients hospitalized statewide with virus-related conditions.

Less than four full months later, the state lifted all business-related restrictions last week. As of Thursday, the statewide positive test rate was 0.62 percent and 203 residents were hospitalized statewide with virus-related conditions.

"Our mass vaccination sites played a critical role in the Commonwealth's vaccination process over a very short period of time," Baker said of the wind-down of the mass vaccination sites early in May.

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(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)