All adult Missourians can get COVID vaccine beginning April 9, Gov. Mike Parson says

All adult Missourians will be eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine in three weeks, Gov. Mike Parson announced Thursday.

A Phase 2 group of 880,000 Missourians “essential to equitable economic recovery” will be eligible earlier, on March 29. That category includes those in higher education, restaurants, construction, manufacturing and populations facing disproportionate risk of contracting the virus, such as the homeless.

Missouri this week began vaccinating teachers, grocery store workers, bus drivers and other essential workers, a “critical infrastructure” group that the state estimates includes 550,000 residents. Also currently eligible in Missouri are health care workers, senior citizens and those with certain pre-existing conditions.

Next Monday, Kansas will open eligibility to phases three and four of its rollout. State officials said this will include an estimated 600,000 Kansans with medical risks and essential workers.

By April 9, when all eligibility phases are open in Missouri, 4.5 million residents will qualify for a vaccine. Parson said the state estimates 60% will want one.

“We anticipate that as we get further out, we will encounter more vaccine hesitancy,” said Dr. Randall Williams, the state’s health director, at a news conference.

Parson made the announcement the day before the state plans to hold a “mega-vaccination” event at Arrowhead Stadium that would allow at least 6,000 Jackson County residents to get the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot.

That event is intended to shrink the Jackson County Health Department’s waiting list. It has 72,000 residents from the phase for senior citizens and those with pre-existing conditions, and 40,000 from the critical infrastructure category that opened this week, a spokeswoman said.

The governor also hinted that the Federal Emergency Management Agency will start holding mass-vaccination events with the federal government’s own vaccine supply in Kansas City and St. Louis. Those events were requested by Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas in a letter to FEMA this month, but Parson said he began communicating with agency officials in late January and the state is “working on those plans.”

State officials originally intended to open the next vaccine phase 45 days from this week. But Parson said the state is “well ahead of schedule” and expects vaccine shipments from the federal government to “increase significantly by the first week of April.”

“It is critical that we start preparing for this potential influx and ensure there is a consistent number of people who are eligible and interested in receiving a vaccine,” he said.

The state next week expects to receive 83,000 first doses of Pfizer vaccine, more than 59,000 doses of Moderna and 7,000 doses of Johnson&Johnson, officials told health care providers in a weekly vaccine call on Tuesday.

Those numbers are expected to rise to 245,000 of Pfizer, 175,000 of Moderna and more than 88,000 of Johnson&Johnson in the first week of April.

On March 29, when the phase that includes construction and restaurant workers opens, the state also plans to change its allocation methods.

So far, Missouri has been sending doses to regions across the state based on each region’s share of the population. At the end of the month it will distribute vaccine based on the share of eligible people in each region who have not yet received a dose. That is expected to shift a greater share of the supply toward the regions containing Kansas City and St. Louis.

This story was originally published March 18, 2021 at 4:53 PM.