People lined up at Orange Avenue School on Saturday with lawn chairs and thermoses four hours early to receive their H1N1 injections. By the time the clinic opened at 11 a.m., the line had snaked out the main entrance, around the building, and out to the soccer field.

Despite the high turnout, almost everyone agreed that the vaccination clinic went very well.

“It moved smoothly, it was set up right, we had what I considered to be sufficient personnel,” said Cranford’s health officer Warren Hehl, who organized the clinic.

Cranford received roughly 3,000 injections to administer on Saturday. The clinic administered the inactivated vaccine, which contains a dead H1N1 virus and is injected into the muscle. Also on the market is a live vaccine, administered as a nasal spray, which Cranford did not receive.

The clinic was for priority target groups: pregnant women; people between the ages of six months and 24 years; health care workers; and caregivers to children under six months of age.

Hehl said the federal and state authorities who distributed the vaccines insisted that protocols such as only giving the vaccine to those groups be followed. He said that if the protocols were violated, the vaccines would be pulled and Hehl would be unable to run any more clinics.

Among those who were administering the shots were a handful of students from Union County College’s practical nursing program.

“The flu clinics are excellent for the students,” said Marianne Schubert, one of the program’s faculty members. “When they’re in the hospital, depending on the patients, they may not have the opportunity to do injections. Here, they’re probably averaging at least 20 shots a day. That’s more than they get in an entire semester.”

Schubert attributes the high turnout to anxiety.

“I think people are really, really worried,” she said.

One person who wasn’t worried was Susan Foster, a health care worker, who was there to get vaccines for herself and her two children.

“I’m not very concerned,” she said. “Everyone seems to be doing a good job protecting themselves.”

Foster said the vaccine administration at Orange Avenue went “very smooth.”

Volunteer Tracey Paradiso, who was helping people fill out their paperwork, concurred.

“It went very, very smoothly,” she said. “No problems that I saw.”

This is only the first of many such H1N1 vaccine clinics. Although Hehl is not sure when the authorities will let him administer the vaccine to everyone—not just priority target groups—he’ll be ready when they do.

“We’ll continue to have clinics until everyone who wants a vaccination has gotten a vaccination,” he said.