Approximately 1.5 million Alabamians are now eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, but making an appointment and receiving a vaccine can be a difficult task.
Eight large-scale drive-in clinic locations were launched this week and Walmart and Sam’s Club announced that the vaccine would be offered at 74 locations throughout Alabama. But getting an appointment can be a challenge.
There are more places offering the vaccine than ever before, but supplies are still limited and not every place on the Alabama Department of Public Health’s vaccine supplier list has doses to administer. None has enough for everyone.
So for those who are eligible – currently people aged 65 and over, medical personnel, educators, childcare workers, first responders, prison officers, grocery workers and others – here are the best ways to apply and get the vaccine.
Drive-through clinics, hospitals
The locations that are delivering the majority of vaccine doses today are those eight drive-through locations and the largest hospitals in the state.
Since the end of January, the state has administered about 100,000 doses of vaccines per week. This week saw the launch of some drive-through clinics that aim to distribute 2,000 a day in each clinic. This is a large part of the photos available in Alabama.
You can find the list and contact information for these clinics here. Most require booking (the Montgomery and Selma websites do not), and some have already had to refuse people who attended without consultation or people who were not part of the groups eligible to receive the vaccine.
Several hospitals in Alabama have their own online applications to request vaccine appointments, listed below:
UAB Hospital
Huntsville Hospital
East Alabama Medical Center in Opelika
USA Health in Mobile
Selma Hospital
Decatur Morgan Hospital
Southeast Health in Dothan
DCH Regional Medical Center in Tuscaloosa
Baptist Health in Montgomery
In Mobile and Baldwin counties, you can also register with Infirmary Health by calling 251-341-2819.
In Anniston, you can register with Northeast Alabama Regional Medical Center by calling 256-235-5600.
In Birmingham
If you live in the Birmingham area or wish to travel there, UAB Hospital has three drive-through clinic units. These locations are the UAB Hospital Highlands parking deck, the Hoover Met Complex stadium parking lot and Parker High School in Birmingham, west of Interstate 65.
These sites require an appointment, and UAB officials say people are showing up “every day” without an appointment and need to be turned down. You can request an appointment at one of these locations through the UAB vaccine portal or administered by the Jefferson County Emergency Management Agency.
Dr. Sarah Nafziger, who heads UAB’s vaccination operations, said people do not have to live in Jefferson County to receive the vaccine at one of these locations.
Jefferson County and Birmingham officials are also working to expand access to the vaccine to people without Internet access or transportation, offering free travel to and from mass vaccination sites and holding a handful of unscheduled vaccine opportunities for people who live near the local Parker High School vaccination.
At Walmart, urgent care
Beginning February 11, 74, Walmart and Sam’s Club locations will offer the vaccine at their pharmacies. These locations are spread across the state, but almost all are outside the metropolitan area of Birmingham, as the Walmarts were designed to reach areas of the state further away from large hospitals.
Walmart requires an appointment. You can see a list of participating locations here and request an appointment at www.walmart.com/covidvaccine for Walmart and www.SamsClub.com/covid for Sam’s Club. It is not necessary to be a member of Sam’s Club for people to receive the vaccine.
MainStreet Family Care and KidsStreet Urgent Care also have 17 locations in Alabama offering the vaccine with an online scheduling portal here: https://www.mainstreetfamilycare.com/getting-the-covid-19-vaccine-in-alabama/
Other providers
There are other providers offering the vaccine in Alabama, but it can be a little more difficult to track.
The Alabama Department of Public Health maintains a list of more than 800 vaccine providers on its website and a map showing where they are located. But that includes all places that have applied to apply the vaccine. Not all of these providers have doses of vaccine to administer.
Some of them have not yet received a vaccine shipment, and many of those who have received it are full and do not make an appointment.
So it’s not as simple as finding the location on the map closest to you.
Last week, Alabama health official Dr. Scott Harris said there were still about 500 of those 883 locations that had not yet received a dose. And the map does not indicate whether that provider has already received a vaccine or is offering consultations.
Most providers do not have a website phone number listed on the map, so you will need to obtain the name of a facility near you on the map and then find out how to contact them to determine if they are dialing one. time and how to register.
The state health department has a portal for scheduling appointments at county health departments at ALCovidVaccine.gov.
Unfortunately, on Wednesday night, the portal reported that all appointments are currently scheduled and asks people to come back later. The state also has a notification tool to subscribe to updates on when new groups become eligible to receive the vaccine, but it currently does not offer a way to be notified when more consultations are available.
Check your messages frequently
If you have requested appointments from providers, it may be worth checking your messages frequently.
Dr. Nafziger of UAB said the clinic usually makes appointments when the vaccine is in hand, ready to be administered. This means that people can be notified at the last minute that an appointment is available.
“Unfortunately, with this process, it will be last minute for many of us,” said Nafziger. “This is the nature, because the way vaccine distributions are coming, we want to use the vaccine very quickly.
“And that means last-minute communication about appointment times. We ask everyone to be patient with us, check their email frequently, check their messages and be sure that you are looking for these queries. It will usually be in the short term, unfortunately, there is nothing I can do to improve it. “
Their clinics top their appointments by a small amount in case of a no-show, she said, and keep a list of patients on standby to receive any extra doses that may be left at the end of the day.
“We have a group of people that we can call who are on hold, who qualify for the vaccine, but have not yet been programmed, and we can notify these people and put them on quickly,” she said.
She also said that sometimes volunteers who work at vaccination sites can receive doses later in the day.
Don’t delay
There is still not enough vaccine to circulate in Alabama, and clinics are limited by the number of doses they have. Most do not schedule appointments until they know they will have enough vaccines to administer in those appointments.
Some places are reserving weeks in the future and others are already booked until March.
So, if you’re eligible, don’t delay. Apply now and it may still take a few weeks before you get your appointment.
Do not double booking
Now, the part where we ask you to be considerate of everyone else in Alabama.
The difficult thing is to get an appointment. Once you get that commitment, you’re all set. So far, we do not know if anyone who received an appointment was declined. Please do not make multiple appointments for the vaccine. If you signed up at multiple places and received an appointment at one, cancel the others as soon as possible.
People who make multiple appointments block the system for other people who need it.
What to bring
The Alabama Department of Public Health asks everyone who comes to get a vaccine to bring a mask, a photo ID and proof that they are eligible to receive the vaccine, be it an identity card showing they are 65 or older or proof of employment in one of the sectors included in the current rollout phase.
They must also bring information about health insurance if there is coverage. Although the vaccine is free for individuals, there is an administrative fee paid by health insurers or the government for people without health insurance.