Asheville, North Carolina: The Mountain Area Health Education Center (MAHEC) and the University of North Carolina Asheville (UNC Asheville) have joined forces in the global fight against COVID-19. Starting in February and going through May 2021, the partnership between UNC Asheville and MAHEC will operate a COVID-19 immunization site at the UNC Asheville Reuter Center located on 1 Campus View Road in Asheville.
The indoor site will operate as vaccines are made available by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. This week the site is tentatively scheduled to operate Friday (2/19), Saturday (2/20) and Sunday (2/21) from 8-5 p.m. each day depending on vaccine availability. Appointments are required to enter the site. No one without an appointment will be allowed to enter.
Currently, according to NCDHHS guidelines, individuals 65 and older and all healthcare workers are eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccination. To do so, please visit: covid.mahec.net (no “www” and no “https”) to register for the waitlist. Community members on the waitlist will be contacted to make an appointment as vaccines become available.
Future dates and hours of operation will be announced in advance and plans will scale over time to allow for 300 vaccines per day up to 1,950 per week as staffing and vaccine allotment allow.
“As a key community partner in Western North Carolina, UNC Ashville is honored to collaborate with MAHEC to provide lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines to our community,” said UNC Asheville Chancellor Nancy J. Cable. “Our joint COVID-19 immunization site further deepens the close collaboration our two organizations have fostered since the beginning of the pandemic and demonstrates our shared commitment to serving the needs of our community in Asheville and the region.”
“MAHEC and UNCA are eager to urgently vaccinate as many people as possible every week until COVID is no longer present in Western North Carolina,” commented MAHEC’s CEO Jeff Heck. “UNCA is a great partner and together we will work to bring the vaccine to as many residents as possible.”
UNC Asheville is managing and coordinating the vaccine site, logistics, traffic, and safety, while MAHEC is coordinating the clinical operations: pre-registration/waitlist, vaccinations, data entry and clinical and non-clinical volunteers.
The Mountain Area Health Education Center (MAHEC) was established in 1974 and is a leader in healthcare, education and innovation. Located in Asheville, MAHEC serves a 16-county region in Western North Carolina. It is the largest Area Health Education Center in North Carolina, which evolved to address national and state concerns with the supply, retention and quality of health professionals. MAHEC’s mission is to provide and support educational activities and services with a focus on primary care in rural communities and those with less access to resources to recruit, train, and retain the workforce needed to create a healthy North Carolina. MAHEC’s Biltmore campus is also home to UNC Health Sciences at MAHEC, an academic health center in partnership with UNC-Chapel Hill that includes programs from the UNC School of Medicine, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, and UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. For more information, visit www.mahec.net.
About UNC Asheville
UNC Asheville offers an education that is adaptive, affordable, and endlessly relevant as the only liberal arts and sciences campus in the University of North Carolina System. Our small class size, award-winning faculty and a nationally acclaimed undergraduate research program foster connections between curiosity and critical thinking, courage and challenge, imagination and impact, opportunity and responsibility.
Learning here expands well beyond the classroom walls. Focusing on undergraduate studies, we help students dig into learning, whether they participate in faculty-mentored research projects, undertake career-related internships, study abroad, or join service projects that make a profound impact at home and around the world. About 3,600 undergraduate students and about 330 full- and part-time faculty bring the campus alive with a genuine hunger to take on new challenges and opportunities through the more than 30 majors offered.
Surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains in one of America’s great small cities, Asheville, North Carolina, UNC Asheville offers an experience where every path leads to a new vista, where there’s room for every voice, and where the future is a frontier. For more information, please visit: www.unca.edu.
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