HYNES CONVENTION CENTER HOLDS SOFT LAUNCH OF NEW MASS VACCINATION SITE
BOSTON HERALD
The cavernous exhibition halls of the Hynes Convention Center are humming with activity once more.
The Back Bay center that’s hosted everything from comic conventions to jazz festivals is now up and running as the state’s latest mass vaccination site.
After the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center housed the city’s field hospital during the “darkest days” of the pandemic, Massachusetts Convention Center Authority Executive Director David Gibbons said he’s thrilled to see the Hynes serving up shots — and hope.
“We were a hospital for a number of months” at the BCEC, Gibbons said Friday. “So now to be here at our other facility, the Hynes, for vaccination, and hopefully the light at the end of the tunnel — it’s a brighter day.”
The Hynes held a soft launch Thursday and Friday ahead of its official opening on Monday — which is also the day those ages 60 and older and certain essential workers become eligible for vaccines.
Operators CIC Health say they’ve taken lessons learned from their mass vaccination sites at Fenway Park, Gillette Stadium and Roxbury’s Reggie Lewis Center and applied them to the Hynes — tweaking signs and even the position of vaccination tables to make everything as efficient as possible.
“This is set up like a military operation,” Gibbons said.
Gov. Charlie Baker announced earlier this month that the Hynes would replace the Fenway Park vaccination site, which will close March 27 ahead of the Red Sox opening day on April 1. Barely a mile away, the Hynes is accessible by public transportation, and Boston Properties is allowing up to two hours of free parking in the Prudential Center Garage with a voucher.
The Hynes administered 500 Pfizer vaccines per day during its soft launch and expects to get 1,000 shots into arms a day beginning next week, with plans to ramp up to 5,000. The site will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week to start.
“As we expand to a much bigger venue we’ve learned a lot,” Matt West, director of operations for the Cambridge startup CIC Health, said. “Here we have incredible flow to be able to move people through quicker than some of the old parts of Fenway Park.”
West said he’s not sure how long the Hynes will be needed, but “we’ll be here as long as we need to be here.”
“We take our direction from the state,” he said. “So whatever they have us do, we’ll be here to make sure that that happens.”
Matt West of CIC Health shows off the vaccination room at the Hynes Convention Center on March 19, 2021 in Boston, Massachusetts. (Staff Photo By Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)