By SCOTT JACKSON
With the Red Sox set to open their home slate on April 1, the mass vaccination clinic at Fenway Park will be relocating before the end of March.
Gov. Charlie Baker on Thursday announced a new mass vaccination site would open at the Hynes Convention Center, replacing the Fenway Park site. Vaccinations will begin at the Hynes Convention Center on March 18 and end at Fenway Park on March 27.
“These sites will overlap for a couple of weeks,” Baker said during a press conference in Lawrence. “All individuals that are vaccinated at Fenway Park and have a second appointment scheduled will be able to receive their second dose at the Hynes.”
Baker said any residents impacted by the transition would receive an email with more details from the organization who is running the Fenway Park site. There will be additional outreach efforts as well.
The governor said it made sense to move the site away from Fenway Park with the stadium set to host games and other baseball-related activities – and as businesses in the area open up on game days.
“To have ballplayers in the park at the same time you have people in the park who are there for a different purpose, we just felt was a little more complicated than we felt was appropriate for this. The Hynes is available and it’s not that far away and it will have the ability to scale,” Baker said.
“As the baseball season moves forward, they are going to open up some point some of the stuff on Yawkey Way. From our point of view, the Hynes was more permanent solution we could use on a go-forward basis.”
As of Thursday, 25,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered at Fenway Park. That number should grow to 55,000 before it closes at the end of March, Baker said.
“This month, new Hynes site will ramp up to do the same volume of vaccinations that are currently being done at Fenway Park, which is about 1,500 a day,” he stated. “Later this spring, if our supply increases, the Hynes has room to scale up to more than 5,000 shots per day.”
Fenway Park is one of seven mass vaccination sites in the Bay State. The others include the Reggie Lewis Center in Boston, the DoubleTree Hotel in Danvers, the former Circuit City in Dartmouth, Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, the Natick Mall, and the Eastfield Mall in Springfield.
There are some 170 vaccinations sites located throughout Massachusetts. Appointments can be booked online at mass.gov/covidvaccine. Those unable to use the website can call 2-1-1 and follow the prompts to schedule an appointment.