Bijeta Lamichhane
News Editor
On April 2, President Sarah Bolton sent an email sharing that the College will be partnering with the Wooster Community Hospital to provide a vaccination clinic for the campus community. “The timing depends on exactly when the vaccine is shipped and made available, but we expect to be able to do several clinics on campus within the next two weeks,” Bolton stated. In the coming weeks, those on campus will have access to Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine, which only requires one dose for a person to be considered fully vaccinated.
According to the CDC, the vaccine exhibited a 66.3 percent efficacy rate in clinical trials to prevent COVID-19 after two weeks of receiving the vaccine. The vaccine was also fully effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths in clinical trials. The CDC has stated that “no one who got COVID-19 at least four weeks after receiving the J&J/Janssen vaccine had to be hospitalized.”
This news comes following Governor Mike DeWine’s announcement that every person in Ohio above the age of 16 would be eligible to receive a vaccine after March 29. In a survey that Bolton had sent after the vaccine eligibility expanded to include college-aged students, 79 percent of the 755 respondents stated that they had already made plans to receive vaccination, and 30 percent had already received their first shots.
Many students have expressed relief about the eligibility as well as the availability of vaccines, and several have been diligent about getting vaccinated as soon as possible. On March 24, Ashland County Health Department announced that anyone over the age of 18 would be able to receive a vaccine that day on a walk-in basis between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m., and several students took the opportunity to receive their shots. Likewise, several students also called different pharmacies nearby and asked to be put on a ‘no-waste list,’ and many received calls from the pharmacies to get their shots several days before the eligibility to vaccines had expanded. One student, Emma Saxton ’22, shared her experience about how she received her vaccine.
“It was one of my teammates who told me that the Ashland pharmacy had extra vaccines and that I could call to be on the ‘no-waste list’ or to schedule an appointment,” Saxton detailed. “I wasn’t expecting to hear back from them for a while, so I was really surprised when they called me three days later saying they had an extra if I could get there in the next hour. I figured other pharmacies would have similar programs as well to reduce vaccine waste.”
When asked about what the process of getting vaccinated was like, Saxton explained, “The process was pretty easy, I didn’t even need to wait in a line. I just filled out some paperwork and waited 15 minutes afterwards until they said I could go!”
In an effort to offer flexibility with scheduling appointments, the College has also announced that students will be paid for the hours they miss if their appointment conflicts with their work schedule. “If the vaccination is scheduled during the student’s regular work hours, the student will be paid for the time they have missed,” an email sent by Student Employment read. “The supervisor should use the student special pay code (SSP) for that period when approving the student’s time in Scot Web.” It clarified, “If the student is not normally scheduled during the time of the vaccine, they would not receive any pay.”
To schedule a vaccine appointment, visit gettheshot.coronavirus.ohio.gov/. To learn more about the Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine, scan the QR code:
