By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
With flu season just around the corner, the St. Joseph Health Department is getting residents prepared with a flu shot clinic today.
The clinic will run from 9am to noon, or while supplies last, at the Civic Arena in downtown St. Joseph for residents 19 years and older.
Clinic Supervisor Holly Hazzard says you can pre-register for the clinic online but walk ins will also be accepted.
"When you walk in, we're going to ask you some questions, give you some paperwork, and it will be a pretty process to pull you through," Hazzard tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. "We ask that you have your driver's license handy and if you have insurance cards have that out too, insurance is accepted but not required, and you will not receive a bill for any of these services it's completely free to the public."
Hazzard says at this clinic residents will only be able to get their flu shot as the department has not yet received doses of the COVID vaccine.
"We are hoping that it comes in soon, but we don't have it available yet," Hazzard says. "Once it does become available, I do plan on doing some COVID clinics, but for this year it's just flu."
Hazzard says a benefit to coming to the clinic is things will move faster than they would if you got your shot at the health department.
"The clinic that's all we're doing, we've got all hands-on deck, so it's going to go really smooth and real fast," Hazzard explains. "At the health department we're doing lots of things out of the same window so it does go a little bit slower and you have to take into account the other things that we do at the health department, so you might have to wait for other people to get vaccines of different types and still have to fill out your paper work and kind of sit and wait."
200 doses of the flu shot are what the health department will have on hand at Civic Arena, and Hazzard says rarely do they have to turn people away.
If you are unable to make it downtown today, flu shots will be available tomorrow when the health department reopens.