Northfield Methodist Church vaccination site to close today

The Northfield Methodist Church Covid-19 vaccination site will close its doors on October 15.

The church partnered with the Northmead Clinic as a vaccination site, which was opened to the public on July 26.
The vaccination site will be now based at the Northmead Clinic.

Northfield Methodist Church minister Quinton de Beer said this is due to the decreased number of people who come to the site.

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“We are also a voting station and we need to hand over to the IEC. However, we would be happy to partner with the clinic should there be a need,” said de Beer.

He said since they launched the vaccination site they have administrated more than 12 000 vaccines.

“When we started we had 450 to 500 people coming in a day but now it has dropped to about 100. The first and second age group came out in numbers but the 18 to 35 have been a bit slow,” he said.

“We need to encourage them to come forward and get vaccinated. We also encourage business owners to bring their staff through to be vaccinated as a team effort. We have seen petrol station owners bringing their staff and other local businesses.”

De Beer added that they have also managed to vaccinate the elderly from old ages and disabled youth who would be vaccinated from their vehicles.

“It has been a great partnership with the clinic and we have been working well together. It has always been our goal to offer support in the community.

“It has been great to see interaction and level of professionalism from the clinic, which I hope has addressed a lot of stigmas surrounding local clinics. “The John Wesley Community Centre and volunteers from the church also have been a great help,” he said.

The vaccination site operational manager, Sabina Senyatsi, said so far everything has been running smoothly at the site.

“We now we only see about 100 or fewer people a day, but on October 30 we vaccinated 182 people and it was a mix of the young and the old,” said Senyatsi.

“We offer the Pfizer vaccine. There must be a gap of six weeks between the first dose and the second one.”

Senyatsi said they recently conducted a two-day outreach at the Ekurhuleni East College in Northmead to encourage the students to get vaccinated.

“It is important to get vaccinated to help your immune system learn how to defend itself against the Covid-19 virus. This will help us go back to our normal lives and be able to travel and attend gatherings,” she said.

Department of Health assistant director for nursing in Benoni and Brakpan Refiloe Sapie said in Ekurhukeni they have has administered more than 450 000 vaccines.

“We hope that we will be able to administrate over a million Covid-19 vaccines to the residents especially with the launch of the Vooma Vaccination Weekend drive, which was launched on October 1,” said Sapie.

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