On Dec. 22, Gov. Greg Abbott sat in a conference room at the Ascension Seton Medical Center in Austin and rolled up his sleeve for the cameras. A nurse pricked a dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine into his left arm and state officials and hospital staff in the room applauded.
Abbott then threw up his arms: “It’s that easy,” he said.
The event was a celebration of a major milestone in the battle against the coronavirus. Although cases were still mounting in Texas and new hospitalizations were climbing, 1.4 million health care workers and vulnerable Texans were set to receive the vaccine by the end of 2020, Abbott said, with millions more to come soon after.
But in the days since that celebration, getting that vaccine to the people eligible to receive it has proven far from easy. The vaccine’s rollout has been marred by poor messaging from state officials, technical errors and logistical delays.
As the final hours of 2020 ticked away, it was unclear whether anyone in the state knew how many doses of the vaccine had been administered here. And after state officials had expressed concern that vaccines were going unused and urged providers to give them to anyone who was eligible, many who met the qualifications were finding it difficult — if not impossible — to track down anyone with vaccines to give. Many counties asked Texans to sign up via an iPhone application or through an online registry, and some elder Texans are finding those technologies onerous.
The confusion left medical experts and people urgently awaiting the vaccine frustrated and questioning how the state would be able to handle smoothly administering vaccines to a population of nearly 30 million in the coming months.
“All of this seems to have been avoidable if it had been properly thought through,” said state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin.
Mixed messages and confusion
State officials never planned to administer the vaccines themselves. Instead, a state panel would set their own eligibility guidelines based on recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. State officials would allocate an appropriate number of vaccine doses to providers, such as pharmacies, doctor’s offices, hospitals and medical clinics. The providers would receive shipments from the federal government.
Shipments of the vaccine first began arriving at Texas hospitals on Dec. 14. The limited supply, under Phase 1A of the state’s rollout, was reserved for front-line health care workers and residents and staff members of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, which have been decimated by the virus. State officials estimated there were 1.9 million Texans eligible in that first tier.
One week later, on Dec. 21, Dr. John Hellerstedt, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, announced that Texans 65 and older and people who are at least 16 with certain medical conditions, would be next in line. Health officials said it would likely be at least a few weeks before that group, referred to as Phase 1B, could receive their vaccinations.
But two days later, Hellerstedt moved up the timeline. The state’s vaccine tracking system, ImmTrac2, reported “a significant portion of vaccine in Texas may not be administered yet,” according to a letter he sent to health care providers that had received shipments of the vaccine. Hellerstedt directed providers to “administer their entire allotment with all deliberate speed.” At the time, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen said the Dec. 23 letter was meant to encourage providers not to wait until everyone in the 1A group had been vaccinated before moving on to the 1B group.
Abbott gave a similar message on Tuesday. In a tweet, he suggested that an excess supply of vaccine was available and criticized providers for not moving quickly enough to administer it.
“A significant portion of vaccines distributed across Texas might be sitting on hospital shelves as opposed to being given to vulnerable Texans,” he said.
That same day, Hellerstedt directed providers to “immediately vaccinate” all eligible Texans, including those in the 1B group. State data showed at the time that just 136,700 people had been vaccinated with at least one dose of the vaccine, a fraction of doses reportedly available. Earlier, state health officials said 1.4 million doses were allocated to providers across the state before the end of the year, but by then their allocation estimate had decreased to 1.2 million.
The state data suggested that there was an ample supply of vaccine — enough to expand eligibility to the 1B group weeks ahead of time. But in reality — as thousands of Texans would soon discover — doses of the vaccine remained in short supply.
Carrie Williams, a spokesperson for the Texas Hospital Association, challenged Abbott’s claim that there was an excess inventory of vaccines, saying the industry is moving as fast as possible.
“We are certainly not sitting on vaccine,” Williams said. “Vaccine is not sitting on hospital shelves.”
Vague messaging from state health officials left Texans who were desperate to get vaccinated without clear answers of where and how they schedule a vaccination. Many frantically called pharmacies, where they get their flu shots, for help.
Marie Theresa Hernandez, who is over 65 and a professor of world cultures and literatures at the University of Houston, said a new surge in COVID-19 cases has put her and her family on edge. In recent days, the vaccine confusion added another layer of stress: false hope.
Earlier this week, her adult children in Austin and London were led to believe over social media that vaccinations were easily available in her home of Fort Bend County. But after two days of calling around, Hernandez could not find anyone who could give her one.
“We’re all kind of in limbo,” she said.
But mostly, she misses her grandchildren in London.
“We didn’t get to see them this year because of COVID,” she said. “We were hoping then maybe with the vaccine we could go a little sooner than later and now, it’s like, we have no idea.”
Pharmacies like CVS and H-E-B say they are still focusing on vaccinating medical workers or people in long-term care facilities. They don’t have enough doses to vaccinate the general population, they said.
Dya Campos, H-E-B’s director of government affairs, said Thursday the grocery chain’s pharmacies have the capacity to administer around 100,000 doses of vaccine each week. Just a week after receiving its first shipment of 28,000 doses of vaccine, the company has administered or scheduled every single dose. Now it’s left waiting for the state to tell it both how much vaccine it will receive in its next shipment and when that shipment will arrive.
Right now, across its hundreds of Texas stores, it has none. Customers who call the H-E-B pharmacies receive pre-recorded answers saying they are not yet distributing vaccines to the general public.
“We are prepared to vaccinate more Texans, and we are just waiting to see how much allocation we’re going to get on a weekly basis,” Campos said.
This uncertainty makes it nearly impossible to schedule people in the next phase. Once H-E-B does get more doses, Campos said eligible customers will be able to schedule a time to get their vaccine on the website or by calling. Eventually, if the pharmacy has enough doses, it hopes to accept walk-ins.
CVS, which plans to spend the next three months focusing on vaccinating 275,000 residents and staff at 2,000 long-term care facilities in Texas, is also not yet opening up vaccine appointments to the general public.
When that does happen — John Fratamico, a CVS district leader in Texas, said this could occur in March — customers will sign up for what Fratamico called a “round-trip ticket.” Using the pharmacy’s website or app, or a 1-800 number, eligible Texans will schedule both the first and second doses of the vaccine on a first-come-first-serve basis.
“In all our lifetime, think about it, nothing like this has ever come up,” Fratamico said.
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.