Pop-up clinics get Oregon kids immunized by deadline

Enrique Campos did not want a shot. The shaggy haired boy wailed in his mother’s arms while she calmly rubbed his shoulder and murmured into his hair.

After the nurse at the free vaccination clinic in East Portland finished checking and double checking that he had the right shot and the right arm, the needle went in. Told it was over, Enrique, 7, stopped crying. His sisters clapped. The boy looked up sheepishly, his face streaked with tears. The anticipation had been worse than the pinch.

“Like any mom — we want the best for them,” his mother, Loren Campos, said later, speaking in Spanish. “You try to relax him, that’s the only thing you can do. Hug him, that’s the only thing.”

The family had been vaccinated in El Salvador, where they lived until a few months ago, but there weren’t as many required shots there, Campos said. When they got to Portland, she realized her kids had to catch up.

“I need to get it now or I am not going to [go to] school,” said Miranda Campos, 9. That was reason enough for the self-possessed Ainsworth Elementary student to get her shots — all three of them — without complaint.

“It’s normal to be scared of vaccines,” she said. To stay calm, she thinks kids should copy her. She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes “and I think something happy.”

The Campos family is among the approximately 5,600 families who received a letter from Multnomah County last week advising them that they had until Feb. 15 to either get their required vaccines or file for an exemption.

More than 26,000 such letters also went out across the state in February 2022, according to the most recent statewide data. Children who do not have either an exemption or a record of up-to-date immunizations will be excluded from school. Last year, more than 5,000 kids attending schools and child care programs were sent home on “exclusion day.” To be allowed back, they had to either get their required shots or file an exemption.

Clinics like the one at McDaniel High School, which was put on by the Multnomah County Health Department, the Multnomah County Education Service District and Portland Public Schools on Wednesday night, are one way the state is trying to help kids get vaccinated and keep learning. More vaccine appointments and clinics are available throughout the state this weekend and next week…

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Photo Credit: Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB