The Big House, America’s largest football stadium, was a well-oiled machine during the worst of the Pandemic
ANN ARBOR, Mich . — With more than 60 percent of the state having at least one dose and cases nosediving, Michigan Stadium ended its six-month-old vaccination clinic Friday.
“Six months and 90,000+ people later — the vaccination clinic at the largest stadium in the United States closes today,” U-M spokesman Jared Wadley said. “I want to thank and congratulate the other volunteers, staff, and nurses for making this a huge success.”
More than 4.6 million people in Michigan received the vaccination. People can still get vaccination shots elsewhere from Michigan Medicine and other physicians, but the massive Big House operation is closing.
As a Michigan graduate and former staffer, this reporter got Pfizer doses in April and May, seeing traffic drop drastically between the two visits. Most students are also off for the summer, contributing to the decline in demand.
The State of Michigan reported 318 new COVID-19 cases Friday, 1,976 cases over the past seven days, representing major drops:
- Two weeks ago, the state reported more than 4,500 weekly cases.
- At the peak of the spring 2021 surge, Michigan reported 49,101 cases the week of April 13–25.
- Michigan reported eight deaths Friday, bringing the total number of Michigan dead to 19,487 since the Pandemic began in 2020.
- The state reported a major drop in COVID-19 hospitalizations: 655 Michigan residents were hospitalized Friday, a sharp decline from the 2,300 hospitalized one month earlier.
- Ascension St. John Hospital in Detroit, a global hotspot for the pandemic in the early days, shows how the pandemic has ebbed and flowed. Back on April 6, 2020, St. John had 295 COVID-19 patients filling 75 percent of the hospital's 400 beds. By last summer 2020, the cases dropped to a dozen, but cases shot back up in the fall, topping 100 per day in April 2021. On Friday, St. John’s cases were at a new low: just six patients.
Demand for vaccinations has dropped with the number of cases
By Friday, nearly 5 million Michigan residents — 61.4 percent of residents16 or older, with 64,700 getting the shot this week.
That was a sharp drop from last week when 75,400 received a vaccination and an even larger drop from two weeks ago when 173,000 were vaccinated.
The Big House joined other Michigan Medicine Clinics that were providing vaccinations starting in late 2020.
The Polio Vaccine began at the University of Michigan too…
Few know today how big a deal Polio was in the 20th century. Then Dr. Jonas Salk, in 1955, returned to the University of Michigan to announce the results of vaccine trials.
Salk’s mentor, Dr. Thomas Francis Jr., director of the Poliomyelitis Vaccine Evaluation Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, had reviewed all of the work and said Salk’s vaccine for Polio was “safe, effective, and potent.”
More than 1.8 million children were administered shots during the trials.
Just one child inoculated with the vaccine died of polio. This death followed a tonsillectomy two days after the second injection of the vaccine (made in an area of his body where Polio was already prevalent).
Today, Polio has been wiped out in the United States. The last Polio case that originated in the United States was back in 1979 though it continues to persist in other parts of the world.
The week of April 12, Michigan Medicine was scheduled to administer 7,965 first-dose appointments, giving the Moderna vaccine at the Brighton Health Center and the Pfizer vaccine at Michigan Stadium. To date, Michigan Medicine has administered more than 139,000 doses.