Baker: Vaccines Passed Major Test in Provincetown

Katie Lannan

The recent COVID-19 outbreak in Provincetown that involved vaccinated people contracting the Delta variant was a major test for the vaccines that have proven effective in preventing death and serious illness from the coronavirus, Gov. Charlie Baker said Thursday.

“I think in some respects, Provincetown was as big a test as you could possibly put a vaccine through,” Baker said. “The significant number of people who were there were vaccinated, it was an enormous crowd, a three-day rainy weekend in Provincetown where everybody talked about the fact that it was a lot of close quarters in restaurants and bars and households. And yet, in a cluster with more than 1,000 people, only seven people were hospitalized, and one person died, and the person who died had a lot of complexities. And I think in some respects, the vaccines have proven their effectiveness, and we should do everything we can to encourage people to get vaccinated.”

Thursday’s Department of Public Health report showed 4,406,542 in Massachusetts fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The three vaccines, from Moderna, Pfizer and Jonson & Johnson, are available under a emergency use authorizations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and Baker said he’d “really like to see” the FDA grant the shots final approval.

“I think there are a lot of organizations out there that are waiting for the federal government to take that final step, and I think it would make a big difference in how many of them think about the questions associated with vaccinations generally, and I think it would make a big difference to a lot of the people that we talk to with our door-knocking exercises and a lot of our community-based vaccine clinics,” he said during a visit to Cengage’s Seaport offices to tout apprenticeship and job training programs.