For several months, Spectrum Healthcare has been the main provider of vaccinations in Yavapai County, with two large sites set up to handle hundreds or thousands of inoculations per day — one at the Findlay Toyota Center in Prescott Valley, as well as Verde Valley Christian Church in Cottonwood.
But as signups for vaccinations have decreased in recent weeks, Spectrum is scaling back its large- scale vaccination sites, finding that the costs of infrastructure allowing for thousands of vaccinations per day are no longer worth it in a county that is barely cracking a thousand vaccinations a day in recent weeks.
“Over the last two weeks we have seen a drop in the number of appointments people were making,” Spectrum Vice President of Information Technology Frank Gutierrez said. “We were operating at 20% capacity. We were only seeing about 200 a day instead of the 1,000 we’re set up for.”
The Verde Valley Christian Church site is reducing its hours down to just three days a week, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The Findlay Toyota Center site closed last week, with vaccinations on the Prescott side moving to the Arizona Dermatology Suite at 300 North Main St., Suite 1A, in Prescott Valley.
“It’s a huge process to have a big [site] like that, and to have to set up and break down like that,” Yavapai County CommunityHealthServices Public Information Officer Terri Farneti said. “To not have people coming, and to set up and be slow, it’s not worth their time.”
According to Gutierrez, a significant part of the decision was based on the aid that Spectrum receives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has been providing employees at Spectrum’s large vaccination stations, but requires a certain number of vaccinations per day in order to keep doing so.
Spectrum officials hope that by reducing its days at its Cottonwood site, each individual day will have enough vaccinations to make it worth it for FEMA to continue to help.
For those who have received their first shot of the Moderna vaccine at the Cottonwood site and had their second shot scheduled for a Monday or Tuesday, appointments are automatically shifted to Thursday and Friday instead, according to Gutierrez, though with the decreased demand, people are now able to come in for walk-in appointments at their convenience, and are free to shift their second vaccination date as they please.
“If they’re Monday we’ll put them in on Thursday, and for the ones on Tuesday, we’ll put them in on Friday, but that’s not a hard- and-fast appointment,” Gutierrez said., adding that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “guidelines allow you to get your second dose four days earlier than the four weeks, or up to two weeks later. If they’re scheduled for Monday, they can come Wednesday Thursday Friday, or even next week according to the guidelines.”
Spectrum will continue with its mobile vaccination clinics, traveling to some of the more rural parts of the county to provide doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which only requires a single shot.
On April 9, the mobile vaccine clinic came to Rimrock, and on Wednesday, April 21, it will be providing doses in the Village of Oak Creek.
According to Gutierrez, demand at these mobile clinics remains high even as it has declined at the large sites. He suggests that bringing the vaccine to people that way, as opposed to requiring them to travel to Cottonwood or Prescott Valley from some- times far away, is making a difference. People in the area are more interested in the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine than the two-shot Moderna vaccine, he said.
“We’re very fortunate right now that we’ve been able to supply the Johnson & Johnson at all of our remote clinics, so that we don’t have to go back for second shots,” Gutierrez said. “We have some people who have been waiting for that, so when they know that it is available they get it.”
The declining demand for the Moderna vaccine has led to Spectrum developing a backlog of over 11,000 doses of the vaccine, frozen for later use. Yavapai County is ordering more vaccine doses every week, but the county would be able to fulfill every currently outstanding second shot based on what is being kept in reserves.
Despite scaling back operations, both Spectrum and Yavapai County continue to strongly urge people to get vaccinated. As of Friday, April 9, the county has vaccinated 34.2% of its population, slightly below the 34.7% vaccination rate for the state of Arizona. The declining vaccination rates continue to cause concern for public health leaders, since they say it prevents the possibility of Yavapai County reaching herd immunity for the virus in the near future.
“Here we are in a county with a huge vaccine hesitancy issue, and it’s been that way forever, for children’s vaccines, for everything,” Farneti said.
In addition to Spectrum, local pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens, as well as retailers such as Safeway and Walmart, are beginning to offer vaccines, which Farneti hopes will lead to increased signups for vaccinations.
