COVID-19 Vaccination Sites Wind Down In Wisconsin

A half dozen community clinics providing COVID-19 vaccines in Wisconsin started to wind down operations Monday as large sites at Lambeau Field and the Alliant Energy Center announced they would be closing June 30 and June 26, respectively.

The state Department of Health Services’ six COVID-19 vaccination clinics in Barron, Douglas, La Crosse, Marathon, Racine and Rock counties will gradually reduce hours of operation to one or two days per week.

The sites provided nearly 83,000 shots, according to DHS Deputy Secretary Julie Willems Van Dijk.

“While these clinics will start ramping down, I want to assure everyone that there are still many ways to get vaccinated,” she said in a press release. “We have said this many times before and it still remains true—our top priority is to make the COVID-19 vaccine as accessible to all Wisconsinites as possible.”

According to state data, 44 percent of residents age 12 and above are fully vaccinated.

In Green Bay, social media posts have reminded people that their chance to “get a COVID-19 vaccine with a view of Lambeau Field” will close June 30 at noon.

“The suites actually overlook the field, so from the standpoint of the patient and being able to take a few pictures with Lambeau in the background it doesn’t get any better than that,” said Sherry LaFond, vaccine site coordinator at Lambeau who works for Bellin Health.

The clinics were a joint effort announced in March between the Green Bay Packers, Bellin Health and Brown County Public Health. After the site closes, vaccines will be provided at Bellin Health Green Bay FastCare clinics.

In Dane County, a former Federal Emergency Management Agency vaccination site at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison plans to stop providing COVID-19 vaccinations and testing June 26, moving operations to mobile pop-up clinics and public health locations.

Local public health officials have conducted roughly 425,000 COVID-19 tests and administered 85,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine at Alliant, according to Tess Ellens, public health nurse and immunization coordinator at Public Health Madison and Dane County.

“It has been the perfect site. We couldn’t have designed a better site for mass through-put in a pandemic situation like this, in order to get a lot of people through in a very short amount of time,” said Ellens.

“That’s been really critical as we’re trying to stay on top of COVID cases with testing and getting as many people vaccinated as quickly as we possibly can,” she added.

Eleven percent of Dane County vaccine doses have been given at the Alliant Energy Center, and about 33 percent of residents received a COVID-19 test at the site, according to a release.