- The Lake Country Pediatrics clinic turned a minibus into a fully functional mobile clinic that goes door to door vaccinating children.
- Concerned parents across America have been putting off vaccinating their children, not wanting to expose them to the novel coronavirus.
- Even prior to the pandemic, the US had a number of significant measles outbreaks, mostly due to a decline in vaccination rates.
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When citywide shelter-in-place orders were issued, many parents stopped taking their children to the doctor to get the vaccines that would prevent them from getting diseases like influenza, measles, and mumps.
But Dr. Greg Moyer, of Lake Country Pediatrics in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, wouldn’t think of letting his patients miss their vaccinations, so he decided to purchase a minibus and convert it into a fully functional mobile clinic.
"We still felt that it was really important to do, even though it's not a revenue generator in any way, shape, or form," Moyer told BI Today.
At first Moyer and his staff considered doing home visits, but those can take weeks for insurers to approve. Instead, insurers see mobile clinics as extensions of the office, so Moyer and his staff can spend insurer-approved workdays in the bus, visiting an average of 10 homes a day.
Inside the mobile clinic, Moyer keeps a full stock of vaccines. He can do every procedure he would normally do in an office, except electrocardiograms. He can test blood pressure, record height and weight, conduct hemoglobin and lead screenings, as well as blood work.
In the bus there's a patient table, a refrigerator for the vaccines, and a smart fogger, which was invented during the SARS epidemic, and works to sterilize the room from viruses and bacteria.
But even as many states lift their shutdown orders, Moyer says he's still going to keep using the van for flu season. He noted that there have been plenty of times in January and February when he's had to cancel visits because they didn't want healthy kids to come into the office and get infected by the flu patients that were there.
"The timeframe was great," said Nikki Herd, the mother of one patient. "One kid came in and the other one out, next one came in. We have four kids. So it was very convenient for us."
Vaccination rates have been dropping since the pandemic
During the pandemic, vaccinations rates have dropped an alarming amount, and experts are warning the public that there could be another measles pandemic because of it.
One CDC analysis showed that in Michigan the vaccination rate for children under 18 years old decreased by 21.5% during the pandemic. In another CDC study, which used data from the Vaccines for Children Program, researchers found that prior to the pandemic, 2,500 children under 18 were getting vaccinated weekly. During the pandemic that number fell to just 500 vaccinations a week.
Without vaccines, measles is one of the most contagious diseases there is, so much so that 90% of people who come in contract with it will get infected.
According to the World Health Organization, this isn't just a problem for American children. They estimate that over 117 million children all over the world are currently at risk of missing their vaccines because of the pandemic.