There will be two pop-up vaccination clinics for COVID-19 in the Rochester-Finger Lakes area on Saturday. One of them will be at the Riverside Convention Center. That is being done in cooperation with Monroe County, local churches and other organizations.
Commissioner of Public Health Dr. Michael Mendoza says this is not something you can go online to make a reservation for. In fact, the opposite is true, because officials want to reach populations who may not have easy access to technology.
“We are going door to door and this is through the help of the Rapid Response Team, Common Ground Health and other partners in the community who are literally going for people, because at the end of the day we vaccinate people, not places,” Mendoza said.
He added that the county looks “at those communities that we have struggled traditionally to reach out to, and so this weekend we’re going to have a process where we’re going to be transporting people to the Convention Center, it is a closed pod setting because we do not want this to be open to the general public for now; we have other opportunities for that, but at the end of the day we really want to make sure we’re reaching out to those harder to reach communities,” Mendoz explained.
The other pop-up vaccination site is at Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church in Geneva. Governor Andrew Cuomo announced 35 of these pop-up sites earlier in the week in an effort to reach underserved populations.
Cuomo said earlier this week that, "COVID has killed Black and Latino New Yorkers at a higher rate and that is why these community-based sites are one of New York's vaccine priorities."
