Wellness at Penn’s annual campus flu clinic takes place at the Pottruck Health and Fitness Center.
Credit: Riya Mitra
Wellness at Penn is hosting its annual flu clinic this week, offering free flu vaccinations to students, staff, and faculty at Pottruck Health and Fitness Center.
The clinic will run from Oct. 15 to 17. Last year, Wellness at Penn’s flu clinic vaccinated approximately 7,300 Penn community members.
“Wellness at Penn is once again hosting its annual flu clinic, aiming to help as many members of the Penn community as possible get vaccinated to reduce the spread of flu and keep campus healthy,” Wellness at Penn’s Director of Communications Mary Kate Coghlan wrote to The Daily Pennsylvanian.
This year’s theme for the flu clinic is “Easy Peezy Lemon Squeezy.” Past themes have included Halloween, Philadelphia, Legos, “Super Mario,” “Stranger Things,” “Friends,” “Pac-Man,” “Animal Crossing,” and “Candyland.”
Coghlan added that in accordance with this year’s theme, during the flu clinic, Wellness at Penn “will also host a lemonade stand on Locust Walk during lunch hours, offering free lemonade and water to anyone who will be stopping by Pottruck for their flu shot.”
Wellness at Penn Executive Director of Public Health and Wellbeing Ashlee Halbritter said students should still get a flu vaccine even if they were sick earlier in the semester.
“We started the beginning of the school year with a round of flu that we don’t normally see that early,” Halbritter said. “I think what’s really important for students to know is that even if they were sick earlier this semester, they should still come get the flu vaccine.”
Halbritter added that the timing of the flu clinic is designed to “protect people over the holidays” and ensure students remain healthy through finals season.
The current flu clinic model of vaccine distribution first began at Penn after years of refinement in response to different public health outbreaks.
In the past, Wellness at Penn would move around to different campus locations before it ultimately switched to a “dispensing site model,” according to Halbritter. Since Wellness at Penn has hosted the clinic in a centralized location for multiple days, they have “started to see a large increase in attendance at the flu clinic.”
The clinic also serves “an emergency preparedness drill that we use every year to practice our own emergency preparedness,” Halbritter added. “But we get to serve the community alongside it.”
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