To: The Wellesley College Community
From: President Paula A. Johnson and Dr. Jennifer Schwartz, Medical Director, Health Services
Re: Information About Vaccination Planning
Date: March 15, 2021
We are writing to update you on our efforts to provide COVID-19 vaccines to students, faculty, and staff. While we are eager to help our community get vaccinated, we are dependent on receiving allotments of vaccine from the commonwealth, and at this time the state is directing the majority of the vaccines to state-operated vaccination sites. We are encouraged by President Biden’s direction to states to open up eligibility for the vaccine to all adults by May 1.
Health Services on the Wellesley College campus is provided by Newton-Wellesley Collegiate Health (NWCH), part of the Mass General Brigham (formerly Partners HealthCare) network. We anticipate that at some point, NWCH will be able to offer vaccines to students either on campus or at nearby vaccination sites established by Newton-Wellesley Hospital because they are patients of Health Services, but it remains unclear whether NWCH will be authorized to deliver vaccines to Wellesley College faculty or staff.
Even if NWCH receives an allotment of vaccine to deliver to our community members, we will still need to respect and follow the state’s phased vaccination distribution plan and timeline. As you may know, Massachusetts is rolling out the COVID-19 vaccine in three phases. The commonwealth is currently in phase 2 of the plan, and is focused on people over 65 years of age, people with comorbid illnesses, and K-12 educators. The state issued guidance regarding how these phases apply to higher education, which makes clear that dining and custodial staff are eligible to be vaccinated in group 3 of phase 2. Most otherwise healthy students, faculty, and staff under age 65 will fall into phase 3 of this approach, which is scheduled to begin in April. We will continue to update you on our efforts to vaccinate you here on campus as the state’s plan evolves.
In the meantime, a new vaccination registration system for Massachusetts went online last week, and we recommend that you take a moment to register so that you get in line to receive a vaccine from a state-operated vaccination site. We also recommend that faculty and staff stay in touch with your primary care physician about vaccine availability and follow the news about the state-operated vaccination sites.
We ask that fully vaccinated students, faculty, and staff voluntarily inform the College of the date on which you received your last dose of the vaccine (date of the second dose in a 2-dose series vaccine or the date of a single-dose vaccine) by providing this information in the Spring 2021 Toolbox. This information will help Wellesley understand the percentage of the community that is vaccinated, which is critical to our health and safety planning going forward.
