Albuquerque Unveils Vaccine Distribution Sites.

Published December 15th, 2020 at 4:39 pm, Last Updated December 27th, 2020 at 5:46 pm

In a presentation before city councilors Tuesday, the City of Albuquerque’s Office of Emergency Management laid out the city’s plan for public vaccine distribution — and it is using a unique list of factors to set those locations.

New Mexico’s first allocation of COVID-19 vaccine includes only 17,550 doses and those were allocated for frontline health workers and high-risk individuals. Members of the general public, designated as “Phase 3” after health workers and critical need patients, are not expected to be able to access the vaccine until spring 2021, but that hasn’t prevented the city’s emergency management team from planning how to disperse it equitably.

Unique to Albuquerque, the City mapped neighborhoods by poverty and social equity then worked to find sites convenient to those areas considered “the most vulnerable,” according to City Emergency Manager Roger Ebner.

Know your pod!

The City’s plan designates vaccine recipients by “pods,” or groups of persons sharing a similar characteristic. Four “closed pods,” such as senior facility residents and critical workers in national labs, will receive the vaccine according to plans designed for their groups. Those groups are considered closed because they are not accessible to the public.

A fifth group, the “open pod” includes all other members of the public who are not already served by another pod.

Don’t get in line yet.

According to the City’s projections for the phase approach implementation, mass public vaccination is not expected to begin until spring or early summer. Public vaccination sites could remain open into the fall.

Find your neighborhood shot spot.

Using social data, including poverty by neighborhood, the City worked to site distribution locations where the vaccine could be most accessible to those in the public who were most vulnerable.

The sites identified by the City include:

High Schools

• Albuquerque High
• Sandia High
• Manzano High
• Highland High
• West Mesa High
• Cibola High

Senior and Multi-Generational Center

• Los Griegos Social Services Center
• Marshall Health & Social Services Center
• Palo Duro Senior Center
• Manzano Mesa Multi-Generational Center

Community Center

• Ted Gallegos Center
• Don Newton Center

See the full list above click the map to open a larger version.