Midlands COVID vaccine clinic shutting down. Here’s when and where it will reopen

Bristow Marchant
·1 min read
Naomi Frazier, a nurse with DHEC, draws vaccinations at a mass vaccination site set up by FEMA at the Columbia Place Mall in Columbia. The site will provide about 1,000 vaccines daily. 4/13/21

A major COVID-19 vaccine clinic is shutting down this week before it plans to reopen in a new location.

Lexington Medical Center’s free, public vaccine clinic at Brookland Baptist Church will close its doors for the last time on Friday. For three months, the clinic has put shots in the arms of long lines of patients inside the church’s gym on Sunset Boulevard, part of a statewide effort to vaccinate as many people as possible.

Starting Monday, the clinic will shift its operations to a doctor’s office at 139 Summer Place Drive, a surgery center off Sunset Boulevard near Interstate 26.

The clinic will also shorten its operating hours, from noon to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. Vaccines are available for anyone aged 12 and up, and no appointment is needed to get the shot. The clinic also offers COVID-19 testing from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. Testing does require making an appointment with Lexington Medical Center.

To date, Lexington Medical Center has administered more than 84,000 doses of the vaccine at Brookland Baptist and other locations.

But South Carolina continues to lag behind the rest of the country in getting people vaccinated against the coronavirus, with 45.8% of the population having received at least one shot of the vaccine, and 38.7% of the population fully vaccinated, according to numbers from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Nationwide, around 64% of the population is vaccinated. The Biden administration has announced a goal of having 70% of the country vaccinated by July 4.