Nirenberg joins in vaccine call
Mayors urge Biden to give doses straight to cities
Mayors of some of the nation’s most populous cities — including San Antonio, Houston and Austin — are asking President-elect Joe Biden to give them direct access to coronavirus vaccines.
In a letter, the 22 mayors urged the Biden administration to establish a national vaccine distribution plan for cities, instead of allocating all available doses to state governments.
“Cities have consistently been on the front line of our nation’s COVID-19 response,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said on Twitter. “I’m proud to join my mayoral colleagues in requesting that the Biden administration prioritize a direct line of vaccines to our communities. We must do all we can to expand and improve access.”
More than 1 million people in Bexar County are in the 1A and 1B tiers eligible for vaccination, but the state had given San Antonio only 154,500 doses as of Wednesday.
And the Metropolitan Health District is only notified once a week by the state about how many doses it will be receiving, making it difficult to
schedule vaccination appointments beyond a week at a time.
San Antonio has “no ability to plan ahead,” Colleen Bridger, interim director of Metro Health, told the City Council on Thursday.
In their letter, the mayors argue that direct shipments of the vaccine would allow local leaders to better plan and connect directly with their constituents, including disadvantaged communities, and help distribute vaccines more swiftly
“While it is essential to work with state and local public health agencies, health care providers, pharmacies and clinics, there is a need to be nimble and fill gaps that are unique to each local area,” they wrote. “Very few cities are receiving direct allocations, and as a result, the necessary outreach needed to lay the groundwork for your vaccination goals are not being met.”
The mayors of the country’s three largest cities — New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago — also signed the letter.
The request comes amid widespread dissatisfaction over a sluggish vaccine rollout; just 37 percent of the total doses allocated to states so far have been put into people’s arms, a Bloomberg News tracker shows.
“While the traditional health care network will be the answer to ongoing vaccinations in the long term, by allocating vaccines directly to cities and providing funding to support their efforts, more vaccines can be administered in a more quick and efficient matter,” they said.
Texas is among the states with the best track record for distributing vaccines so far, with about half of its allocation already administered, according to the Bloomberg tracker.
Still, the vaccine rollout hardly has been smooth in Texas.
Providers across the state have reported supply issues, with too few doses available to satisfy a huge demand. That has left hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of eligible Texans unable to register for a shot and, in many cases, unsure where to look for one.
In San Antonio, all the appointments for 9,000 doses received by the city last week were booked within six minutes.
“They are desperate,” District 7 Councilwoman Ana Sandoval said of local residents. “Because of the small amount of doses compared to the demand and the population size, there is almost a level of hysteria.”
The state shifted its distribution strategy from giving a small number of doses to many providers to instead providing about 30 large-scale providers with thousands of vaccines. T
The effort, state officials said, will consolidate available doses and make them more accessible.
Originally, San Antonio health officials thought the plan would be to administer the vaccine like a flu shot, with residents getting inoculated at their local pharmacies. But with the mass vaccination hubs, thousands of appointments are filling up fast.
There has been a call from some officials to expand the number of vaccination sites to increase accessibility.
However, the problem isn’t that there aren’t enough sites to get vaccinated, Bridger said.
“The problem is that we don’t have enough vaccines,” she said.
The state is not currently reporting demographic data on those who get the vaccine, leaving questions about whether the doses are reaching Black and Latino Texans who have comprised nearly 60 percent of the state’s COVID-19 deaths so far.
Both vaccines approved by the federal government — manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna — require two doses spaced about a month apart.
As of Wednesday, nearly 900,000 Texans had received their first doses, and more than 130,000 are fully immunized, the state’s vaccine dashboard shows.
Bridger estimates that by Saturday, about 114,800 of the 154,500 doses sent by the state to San Antonio will have been administered — 30,000 through four mass vaccination hubs: the Alamodome, Wonderland Mall, Elvira Cisneros Senior Community Center and the Alicia Treviño
Lopez Senior Center.
The assistant city manager told the City Council on Thursday that San Antonio is averaging just under 30,000 vaccinations a week.
“We are a long way away from having enough vaccines to be able to vaccinate everybody who wants to be vaccinated as quickly as they’d like to be,” Bridger said.
Texas is the first state to administer more than 1 million doses — outpacing other large states, including California, Florida and New York.
That milestone is a small step in the effort to vaccinate as many willing Texans as possible in a state of about 29 million residents.
“This is the biggest vaccination effort we have ever undertaken, and it would not be possible without the dedication and tireless efforts of our health care workers,” Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday.
Neither the governor’s office nor the Department of State Health Services responded to requests for comment on the letter.
In total, nearly 2.1 million doses have been set aside for Texans, and about 1.7 million of that supply has been shipped to vaccine providers, including hospitals and pharmacies, state data shows.