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Kansas City, MO – The Kansas City Missouri Health Department is finally holding its first public H1N1 clinic this Wednesday. They'll be giving out some 2,000 doses of the vaccine, starting at 10am. The vaccine, however, will only be available to certain groups of people.
Rex Archer is director of the health department and says they'll just be vaccinating Kansas City residents who are in the highest priority groups. That means pregnant women, children 6 months to 4 years of age, older children with severe chronic health conditions, caregivers of young children, and health care workers.
That doesn't include healthy kids above the age of four, even though they're considered a priority group.
Dr. Archer says the department's being selective because the vaccine's still in such short supply.
"If I were to have the 200,000 doses now and had another 100,000 or 200,000 coming, we'd be fine," he said. "It's because it's trickling in that it's a problem. And I've only gotten 40,000 doses of the vaccine. So only, you know, one out of six people do I have vaccine for that need to have the shot in the priority group."
Dr. Archer says the department would like to hold more public clinics and go directly into schools, but it's hard to predict just when enough of the vaccine will be available to do that.
In the meantime, area public and private health care providers are directly receiving the vaccine for their high priority patients.
Funding for health care coverage on KCUR has been provided by the Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City.
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