The COVID-19 vaccination clinics at Dartmouth College next week will be open to family members of Dartmouth students, staff and faculty regardless of where they reside, college officials announced.
The hope is that the clinics will help get the college and community up to the 70% to 90% vaccination rate that is necessary to achieve herd immunity, Provost Joe Helble said during a virtual community conversation on Wednesday.
“We are not yet there on our campus,” Helble said.
As of Wednesday, just 12% of Dartmouth undergraduates have uploaded vaccination records indicating to college officials that they’ve been vaccinated, Helble said. That’s well below the more than 30% of students at Tuck School of Business and Geisel School of Medicine, he noted.
Increasing vaccination rates is “essential” to expanding the number of in-person activities the college can offer, Helble said.
The clinics, which are scheduled for next Wednesday and Thursday, will likely offer the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and a limited number of Johnson & Johnson/Janssen doses, according to a Tuesday message to the community from Dr. Lisa Adams and Josh Keniston, co-chairs of Dartmouth’s COVID-19 Task Force.
The clinics are slated to offer the Pfizer vaccine from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. each day and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the evenings from 5:35 to 7:30 p.m., the message said.
Appointments, which are required, are open only to those 18 and older who have not yet received their first COVID-19 vaccine.
The deadline to sign up for the clinics is this Thursday at 11:59 p.m. Dependents, partners and household members can sign up at dartgo.org/vaxregfam, while Dartmouth students, staff and faculty can sign up at dartgo.org/vaxappt.
In the meantime, rates of cases of COVID-19 have returned to the low levels previously seen at the college in the fall, Helble said. As of Wednesday, there were seven active cases at Dartmouth, including four students and three employees. Twenty people were in quarantine or isolation.
