Massachusetts officials Wednesday said they’ll be relaxing the state’s vaccine eligibility rules to allow younger people who accompany older residents to mass vaccination sites to get shots themselves.
The new “companion appointments,” effective Thursday, will be allowed for younger spouses, adult children, relatives, neighbors, or caregivers who take residents 75 and over to appointments at the mass vaccination sites. Companions can book two separate appointments, at the same or adjacent times, through the state website www.mass.gov/covid vaccine. Only one companion who accompanies an older resident will be eligible.
State officials, meanwhile, said they’ll be opening mass vaccination sites in Natick, west of Boston, and the southeastern Massachusetts town of Dartmouth in the coming weeks. Those sites will eventually boost the number of state-run mass injection sites to seven.
In a briefing, Marylou Sudders, the state health and human services secretary, also acknowledged that health care providers who have extra vaccine doses left over at the end of the day — doses that have been thawed and can’t be refrozen — are being permitted to inject them in residents who aren’t currently eligible for shots.
While that’s not official state policy, she stressed, “we don’t ever want shots left idle and wasted” because eligible patients, such residents age 75 and over, don’t show up for appointments. She said only 0.13 percent of doses sent to providers have gone to waste.
The moves, taken together, underscore an accelerating push by Massachusetts officials to get more shots in residents’ arms as their vaccination campaign expands at sites across the state.
“We think this helps mass vaccination sites become that much more age-friendly,” Sudders told reporters. “This is not life-altering, but we are trying to do everything we can to help people 75 and over.”
Sudders said the new sites will start out giving about 500 shots a day and eventually ramp up to about 3,000 a day in Natick and 2,000 a day in Dartmouth, depending on federal vaccine supplies.
The federal government is currently allotting Massachusetts about 108,000 first doses weekly of the authorized two-dose vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Cambridge-based Moderna. Those shipments are scheduled to increase in the coming weeks.
On Thursday, state officials said, 74,000 new appointments will be posted for the state’s mass vaccination sites and CVS and Walgreens retail pharmacies. About 30,000 other appointments will be posted during the week at retail pharmacy outlets.
The new injection centers at the Natick Mall and the Circuit City site in the Bristol County town of Dartmouth bring added capacity to the vaccination program. The site at the Natick Mall is set to open Feb. 22, with LabCorp as the medical provider.
Curative will be the medical provider at the Dartmouth site, which is scheduled to open Feb. 24. Eligible residents and companions can book appointments at both sites, starting Feb. 18, through the state’s website.
The state’s other mass vaccination sites are at Fenway Park, Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, the Doubletree hotel in Danvers, and the Eastfield Mall in Springfield. The state also plans to take over operations in the coming weeks at the Reggie Lewis Center in Roxbury, which is currently being run by the city of Boston.
Sudders said the steps taken Wednesday are meant to try to make seniors more comfortable traveling to the mass vaccination sites, which might be unfamiliar to them “unless they’re old rock and roll fans” and had trekked to concerts at the stadiums.
Robert Weisman can be reached at robert.weisman@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeRobW.
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