Eligibility age for vaccine dips down to 50
Requirement change should help Texas raise inoculation rate among residents
Texas entered the next chapter in its vaccination efforts on Monday, as those age 50 and older became eligible for inoculations. Earlier this year, Fort Bend County resident Andrew Soukap was more concerned about finding his 18-year-old daughter a vaccine than he was for himself. She has health conditions that qualified her for a shot in Phase 1B, he said.
Once she was fully inoculated, the 55-year-old waited patiently for his turn in the vaccination queue. On Friday, an opportunity presented itself on his Twitter feed.
“I just happened to be looking at Twitter and saw that Memorial Hermann was opening their clinic at the Smart Financial Centre out here in Sugar Land to anyone over 50,” he said Friday. “I clicked the link and was able to get an appointment for Monday. I caught it just as it had opened.”
Now that Texas has opened Phase 1C, there is an estimated 12 million to 14 million more people between the ages of 50 and 64 who are eligible for vaccines.
Add this to priority groups 1A and 1B — a group of more than 10 million people that includes health care workers, Texans 65 and older, and anyone over age 16 who has an underlying health condition. Earlier this month, the Texas Department of State Health Services made the state’s 1.3 million teachers and child care employees eligible for a dose, as well.
Before Monday, Carol A. CalvoCota, 58, had tried everything to find a vaccine, first for her 63-yearold husband, and then for herself. She has asthma and works at home, so her husband is “the one who goes out.”
She signed them up on the city of Houston and Harris County waitlists to no avail. She also tried to wrangle an appointment through CVS and Walgreens, sometimes waking up at 5 a.m. to start refreshing the website for open slots.
Finally, she found a link through UT Physicians and received her first Pfizer dose Sunday. Her husband’s appointment was Tuesday. Calvo-Cota was told UT Physicians opened their appointments to those 50 and older before Monday’s state eligibility started.
“It shouldn’t be necessary for citizens to have to do this, but we have to help each other or we won’t get out of this, and we’ll be stuck inside forever,” Calvo-Cota said.
Monday’s new eligibility requirements came as vaccination efforts in Texas continue to lag due to, among other things, limited availability of doses and last month’s ice storm, which paused most vaccination efforts for days.
Roughly 4.7 million Texans have received at least one dose of the vaccine, a 15.8 percent vaccination rate that is one of the worst in the nation. And as of last week, more than half of all Texans older than 65 having received at least one dose of the vaccine.
In February, Dr. David Lakey, a member of the Texas COVID-19 Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel, said it would take until May or June until all of the 1B group was vaccinated. And the state is still behind in vaccinating lower-income neighborhoods and ZIP codes that are majority Latino, a population group that has been devastated by the virus.
Calvo-Cota noticed Sunday that most of the people around her were around her age or younger. “That kind of surprised me,” she said. “I thought, ‘Are we finished with the old people?’ ”
The new eligibility requirements came as a huge relief to Joy Hilley.
“I feel like I can breathe again,” said the 60-year-old, who received her first of two COVID-19 vaccine doses on Monday.
For Hilley, the shot felt like the beginning to an end of a year of heartbreak and grief, during which she and her husband, who is at high risk of the virus, have barely left the house. And it’s been a year since she’s thrown the dinner parties that used to be a staple of their calendar.
“To not be able to do that has been horrible,” she said. “It grieves my heart.”
Hilley was just happy to finally have a shot. For the past year, she’s tried desperately to keep her small art gallery afloat, as foot traffic dwindled and events became impossible.
Her husband was fully vaccinated a while ago, and she has been eligible for a while because of her own health complications. But she opted to let others go ahead of her, she said.
“I know how desperate we were to get (her husband) vaccinated,” she said.
The new eligibility requirements eased some of her guilt, she said, and so she spent the weekend scouring websites to see who had available appointments before finally securing one at a Walgreens in the East End neighborhood.