Battle Creek Residents Can Take Advantage Of New Mass Vaccination

Michigan-based retail giant Meijer isn’t messing around. When it entered the mix to offer COVID-19 vaccinations, it went all in. Meijer reports it will open the new state mass vaccination site at the converted Ford Field in Detroit a day earlier than originally set. It opens this morning. The site is open to anyone from even Battle Creek and Kalamazoo. There are no geographical limitations on where recipients live. You just need to make your own way there.

There’s no shortage of people ready to get dosed. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services announced the opening of registration for the site a week ago Monday. Meijer says when it opened its online registration system for the Ford Field site, it took in 40,000 registrations in the first 24 hours. That’s about one every second. There are a lot of business and government agencies that wish their technical systems are that robust.

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Registrations since then have quieted down a bit. But still, Meijer has over 110,000 registered for vaccinations at Ford Field. It plans to run over 14,000 people through the site this week. Meijer system techs sent another 20,000 appointment invitations out overnight.

Meijer was recently named a federal retail pharmacy partner for the State of Michigan. Since then, federal health administrators have added Meijer to their partner list in Indiana, and Ohio. Meijer has since held over 2,500 vaccination clinics in three states. More than 400,000 doses of the vaccine have been administered so far by Meijer clinical specialists. That number will be increasing rapidly with the opening today of the Ford Field site in Detroit.

Meijer is doing everything from managing the on-site check-in process, to supplying specialists to ensure vaccine security and viability. It is using its own IT technicians to handle all of the online access and registration systems. It is also in charge of preserving the immunization records of all those who are vaccinated at any of the clinics it manages.