People with medical conditions that leave them “extremely vulnerable” to COVID-19 along with police, firefighters and college employees of any age can now get vaccinated at the Orange County Convention Center, in the latest expansion of vaccine access in Central Florida.
Orange Mayor Jerry Demings confirmed that professors and others who work on college campuses could now get vaccinated at the county site, a departure from Gov. Ron DeSantis’ current executive order laying out eligibility rules, which currently makes no mention of college staff and only authorizes vaccination for K-12 school employees older than 50.
The governor’s order also limits doses for firefighters and police officers to those 50 or older, a distinction the county also no longer plans to enforce. On Monday, DeSantis announced he would open the vaccine to those 60 and older, down from 65, starting next week.
Demings told reporters he was following guidance of the federal Department of Health and Human Services in departing from the state’s approach.
“We feel pretty comfortable that we’re following the HHS guidance, and that really creates a broader availability and eligibility than what previously had been under the governor’s order,” Demings said.”Remember [the federal government is] controlling the inventory, even the [doses given] to the state. So we’re working with both entities.”
Linda Shrieves, a spokeswoman for Valencia College, said college and university employees also can get the vaccine at Federal Emergency Management Agency-run site on the college’s west campus, though the federal agency did not publicly announce an expansion of eligibility.
Word spread over the weekend that university employees with school ID badges could get the shot at the FEMA site, even though Orange County’s website at the time said employees of K-12 schools, but not colleges, were eligible for the vaccine.
Several instructors posted to social media and alerted colleagues that they had been vaccinated. By late Sunday, Valencia and the University of Central Florida leaders had sent out emails to employees telling them they could get the shots.
“The Provost has sent a notice that FEMA at Valencia West (1800 Kirkman Rd) is vaccinating all educators,” wrote Robert Littlefield, director of the University of Central Florida’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media, in a message to his employees. “Several UCF staff and faculty have been vaccinated at this site.”
Valencia employees also received an email Sunday evening confirming they were eligible.
“At this time, the local distribution site IS allowing local college and university employees to be vaccinated,” wrote Paul Rooney, Valencia’s assistant vice president for operations.
Nicole Hill, a professor of humanities at Valencia, got her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine Monday morning. The process went smoothly and took about 45 minutes, she said.
“It’s a huge relief,” Hill said. “I was emotional. It was unexpected to feel so emotional.”
Hill, 55, said two of her four adult children were very sick after testing positive for the virus and she’s known people who’ve died or been hospitalized after becoming infected. She’s taught remotely for the past year but is eager to return to the classroom, saying she misses meeting in-person with her students.
Providing vaccines to university and college employees is “the right thing to do for public health and safety,” said Candi Churchill, the executive director at United Faculty of Florida. After Gov. Ron DeSantis made employees at K-12 schools eligible for the vaccine through an executive order last week, the statewide faculty union urged him to make the shots available to university and college workers as well.
“University and college workers have been on the frontlines keeping Florida running during this pandemic,” Churchill wrote in an email to the Orlando Sentinel. “The Governor has been pushing for a full return to ‘normal’ at colleges and universities without regard to safety and funding, and left faculty and graduate workers out of vaccine prioritization for ‘all educators.'”
Churchill said that some of the state’s other FEMA sites have been providing vaccines to college and university employees, but distribution had been “scattershot.”
“We need it to be firm national and state policy to include higher education personnel,” she said. “We should not have to rely on rumor or luck.”
Demings said his staff communicated his decision to expand access at the Orange County Convention Center site to the Florida Department of Emergency Management and was told the state wouldn’t interfere if the county legal department deemed it OK.
Medically vulnerable residents seeking vaccinations must provide a doctor-signed copy of a form released last week by the Florida Department of Health. Rather than issuing a list of qualifying conditions, the state is allowing doctors to determine who qualifies as vulnerable.
Orange County also informed the Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Florida on Monday that its staff qualified for vaccines at the convention center, under the same provision that allows vaccination of teachers and child care providers, according to an email obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.
County officials had been lobbying the state to allow them to vaccinate medically vulnerable people at the convention center, which has been inoculating fewer than its capacity of 3,000 shots per day.
Throughout the county, 10,000 appointments were available Monday morning, including 1,000 open for Tuesday at the Orange County Convention Center as of 11 a.m.
“Within the last several weeks, this site can easily serve 3,000 people on a daily basis and we’ve been coming in at significantly under that number,” Demings said. “It’s my opinion based upon the advice that I have received from our medical experts that this helps us move the needle forward to get to that point of herd immunity.”
The state-run drive-through site has slowly expanded the number of people it can handle in a day, but demand has left open slots Orange County officials think can be filled by “extremely vulnerable” people who, until recently, were only eligible for the vaccination at hospitals.
“We would like to increase those numbers,” said Dr. Raul Pino, the state’s top health officer in Orange County. “We have the vaccines, there’s need in the community, so we’re responding to it.”
Staff writers Jeff Weiner and Stephen Hudak contributed.
rgillespie@orlandosentinel.com