KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Tuesday marked the opening of a third mass vaccination facility in Wyandotte County.
Gov. Laura Kelly, invited by Unified Government CEO and Mayor David Alvey, stopped by to take a tour of the facility and hold a round table discussion with members of the county's public health equity task force.
The governor and members of her COVID-19 response team discussed ways the county has worked to get accurate information about vaccines into the community.
"It was clear that you were prioritizing making sure that our vulnerable communities had access to first getting testing done and then moving into vaccines," Kelly said.
Kelly said there's no set date for when the state will move into Phase 3 of its vaccine roll out plan, but the time is approaching.
"I think we're looking at beginning of April to be able to move into Phase 3. That of course is all dependent upon getting enough vaccines from the federal government to finish up Phase 2," Kelly said.
Kansas Department of Health and Environment Secretary Dr. Lee Norman said the goal is uniformity across the state before moving ahead.
"There's no way it'll be absolutely in sync. If it's close enough then that will be good enough to move into Phase 3," Norman said. "The limiting factor is the amount of vaccine, there's an intense demand as you know — 23,400 of the new Johnson and Johnson last week. There was no reluctance by people to get that vaccine. It went out the door real fast."
Kelly said allowing individual counties to move to a new phase before the state might create problems, such as people traveling to smaller counties to get their vaccine and potentially overwhelming those counties.
"That's one part of it, the other part is knowing that we set up the schedule and the process based on recognizing risks and health concerns and so it's important that we get all the folks in Phase 2 done because they're at higher risk than the ones in Phase 3," Kelly said.
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