OXFORD – More than 1,000 people have received the COVID-19 vaccination at Bartle’s Pharmacy in Oxford, and business owners said it wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work and volunteerism of staff members.
Robert Foote was the 1,000th person to receive the vaccine at Bartle’s Pharmacy, and the owner Heather Bartle, thanked her team for making it possible.
When asked about the vaccination, Foote said, “It’s just so nice to see people outside of their homes and for them to have a reason to be happy again.”
“Hopefully this will be the first step towards things going back to normal.”
Bartle also spoke about the vaccinations and said her team has been working tirelessly to try and help as many people as possible.
“It’s great to see the hard work of the entire team pay off,” said Bartle. “They’ve been working for about five months on this, so it’s so nice to see everything come together.”
Bartle said in addition to doing COVID-19 vaccinations, the pharmacy is also providing coronavirus testing services, and now rapid tests are available. She said molecular testing takes approximately three to five days to get results back, but they tend to be more accurate than the rapid tests which only take 15 to 20 minutes to see results.
“We do molecular testing on Tuesday and Thursday, and we just started offering rapid testing which is available seven days a week,” she said. “We’re trying to do as much as we can.”
She added that people can sign up for the molecular tests at doineedacovid19test.com or on their mobile device at www.MyRx.io for more information about the rapid tests.
Bartle said there are still misconceptions about the COVID-19 vaccine that scare people away from being vaccinated, including the rumor that it’s a live vaccine.
“We’ve heard that people are concerned about it being a live vaccination, but that’s not the case,” said Bartle. “It’s impossible for you to get COVID-19 from the vaccine, but we hear things like that all the time.”
Bartle added that the biggest challenge her team is facing currently is getting people scheduled.
“Getting everyone scheduled and here is one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced so far because we don’t know how many doses we’ll get from the state each week,” she said. “It’s really been difficult, and I think folks on the other side of the counter are frustrated with our scheduling.”
“The way it works is everybody goes on a wait list, if we get 200 doses of vaccine then we pull 200 people, if we get 500 doses of vaccine we pull 500 people.”
She added that if New York State offered them more vaccines they would have the capacity to vaccinate more people, and they would be happy to do it.
“We have retired public health nurses that have come out of retirement and are asking for absolutely nothing for their help,” said Bartle. “The mayor and fire chief of Oxford have offered the fire station if there’s ever a chance for mass vaccination.”
“If we got 1,000 vaccines we could do them, I am fully confident that we have the staff to handle that kind of volume.”