SAN JOSE (KPIX 5) – With the holidays approaching, the rush is on for Bay Area families with children newly eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine to get their shots.
In East San Jose on Thursday, the cafeteria at Katherine Smith School wasn’t serving up chicken nuggets, but COVID-19 vaccines to the 5 to 11 crowd.
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The clinic was the first of 80 mobile vaccination clinics Santa Clara County will hold at schools.
“We want to make it as easy as we can for parents,” said Dr. Marty Fenstersheib Santa Clara County’s vaccine officer.
“By having clinics on school sites, we do kind of ease that worry about when they might be able to get an appointment,” said Dr. Mary Ann Dewan, Superintendent of Santa Clara County Public Schools.
Alondra Rodriguez is grateful. Her son and daughter got their first Pfizer doses Thursday. She had been struggling to find them an appointment as parents rush to get their kids vaccinated before the holidays.
“It saves me a lot of time, because especially now in the clinics, it takes up to a month to schedule an appointment for a doctor. When they told me about this, it was like a saving time for me and for my kids as well,” Rodriguez told KPIX 5.
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As a bribe for being brave in the face of a scary needle, six-year-old Serenity Rodriguez will get to go to Disneyland after she’s fully vaccinated.
“I thought it would hurt, but it didn’t,” said Serenity.
It’s not just schools and large vaccine sites, the doses of vaccine for kids are being rolled out to pediatricians’ offices as well.
Shots will be served up at Dr. Jasmin Makar’s office at Stanford Children’s Hospital next week.
Makar said it is important that both parents and kids feel comfortable and safe with who is administering the dose.
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“For pediatricians, vaccinations are our business. So we are really good at it, we are really efficient at it and we know that our parents and families trust us with that responsibility. We’re happy to take this on,” Makar told KPIX 5.
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