Mohawk Ambulance may soon be bringing a coronavirus vaccine to a location near you. WAMC’s Southern Adirondack Bureau Chief Lucas Willard got a look at the company’s new mobile vaccine distribution trailer Wednesday afternoon.
Earlier this month, officials with Albany County, the City of Albany, and Mohawk Ambulance announced a new agreement to use the ambulance company to bring vaccines to eligible residents when they become available. Here’s Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan speaking January 10th.
“If a senior, a 75-year-old, is living in South Mall towers, they should not have to separately go to different places and find different places to get the vaccine. We can come to them."
On Wednesday, Mohawk Ambulance invited reporters to its headquarters in Troy to get a glimpse of the trailer that will be used to carry and administer vaccine.
Mohawk Ambulance Director of Operations Jovan Cruz showed me the two compact freezers – about the size of your regular picnic cooler – inside the trailer.
“These are pharmaceutical grade and these are actually powered refrigerators and freezers. So it’s not actually a cooler. They run through a power source. And they’re capable of both being a refrigerator of a freezer, depending if we’re dealing with Pfizer or Moderna.”
Cruz says each freezer can hold 4,000 doses of vaccine. The trailer is equipped with its own batteries to keep the freezers running, and a generator as a backup.
“It doesn’t look like much, it’s actually more of the power and the utility of the trailer itself,” said Cruz.
Cruz explained that Mohawk Ambulance is ready to go. The mobile unit can carry equipment and also serve as its own vaccination clinic.
“If we go to a public housing community and they have a community room, we have all the tables, chairs necessary to set up if they don’t have them already. Open gymnasiums…if we need to and there’s not an open space, we can utilize the trailer itself since it is heated appropriately and has the power on it to run the refrigerators and freezers,” said Cruz.
Already working with Albany County, Mohawk Ambulance is looking to bring the mobile vaccination vehicle to other counties in the Capital Region.
“Rensselaer County we’ve had some communications with and we’re in the process of communicating with the rest of them as well,” said Cruz.
All that’s needed now is supply.
