Houston Chronicle

A long road for the rollout

‘LEFT OUT’: Suburbs frustrated by lack of access as state opens hubs in metro areas

- By Alejandro Serrano STAFF WRITER

Five mass vaccinatio­n sites are planned and a website is ready for Montgomery County residents seeking inoculatio­n, but emergency officials are missing the key component: vaccines.

In Galveston County, the top health official said they are ready to administer about 1,500 vaccines a day between the government and the University of Texas Medical Branch there, with a countywide plan to double or triple that number. But they’re also lacking vaccines.

And when state officials earlier this week announced 28 providers across Texas would serve as vaccinatio­n “hubs” — receiving the majority of vaccines available this week to streamline the process — not one was in the suburbs of Houston. The three hubs in the region were all in Harris County, making officials in some of the state’s most populous counties fear they’ve been forgotten.

Between two providers, Galveston County received just 400 doses for the week, according to the state’s allocation list. Montgomery County, one of the fastest-growing counties in the U.S. with more than 600,000 residents, received 600 doses. Fort Bend County also received 400 doses. Officials allotted 29,125 doses to Harris County. The state’s numbers did not include a breakdown of 121,875 doses provided to a federal pharmacy and long-term care partnershi­p.

“As of today, we’ve been left out,” Philip Keiser, Galveston County’s local health authority, said midweek. “If we are going to get ahead of this epidemic, what we desperatel­y need to do is get as many people vaccinated.”

Anxious residents have been flooding medical providers with calls and emails trying to track down the much-desired vaccines, especially for elderly residents. For the most part, their efforts have been fruitless.

Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said he and the agency “certainly understand people’s frustratio­n” but that the main obstacle has been a lack of supply to meet demand.

“There just wasn’t enough vaccine,” Van Deusen said. “The focus had to really be on getting a smaller number of providers a larger number of vaccine or focusing on areas that were really remote.”

Part of the difficulty, Van Deusen added, is that the state receives different quantities of doses from the federal government every week. For instance, this week the state had just fewer than 200,000 doses to allocate. Next week, state officials are expecting to distribute about 330,000.

The supply and demand issue is not exclusive to Texas. Earlier this week, federal officials instructed state officials to vaccinate everyone 65 and older who wants to be vaccinated and people with medical conditions that put them at greater risk. Additional­ly, federal officials plan to release all available vaccine doses instead of keeping half to later release for second doses.

“That will change the equation somewhat,” said Van Deusen, adding there will likely be more hubs than the current 28 sites. “It’s just going to take time, and we just really appreciate people’s patience.”

Not having a steady, consistent supply of vaccines — “even if it’s a small amount” — presents a great challenge, Keiser said.

“That allows us to plan, that allows us to communicat­e with our population,” he said.

Rafael Lemaitre, communicat­ions director for Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, noted the whole region overall has received a tiny number of vaccines. Meanwhile, the pandemic’s threat remains present.

“Our primary message for the public right now is to be patient and to stay informed on vaccine availabili­ty,” Lemaitre said. “We are in an emergency situation when it comes to the state of this virus”

In Montgomery County, officials and the providers they will partner with need at least 7,000 vaccines to operate just one of the planned vaccinatio­n sites for one week, said Meghan Ballard Arthur, spokespers­on for the county’s office of homeland security and emergency management. County officials have been in contact with state health officials but don’t have a clear idea when they will receive a significan­t allotment of doses.

“We are just kind of in a waiting game at the moment,” Arthur said. “We kind of don’t have an ETA to when we will be able to start mass vaccinatio­n in Montgomery County.”

She added: “We are willing to take whatever they are willing to give us.”

Brazoria County Judge Matt Sebesta said the county has a plan to open a mass vaccinatio­n site if it receives a big allocation. But he much preferred that each of the 110 providers that signed up to distribute vaccines in the county receives doses so that the distributi­on is more spread out.

“We’re rocking along. We would love more vaccines to be available to our citizens,” he said.

He said vaccine supply is “absolutely” an issue, comparing it to the “supply-chain issues” that occurred in the beginning of the pandemic when personal protective equipment and coronaviru­s tests were in short stock but high demand.

“We’re still in the first five or six weeks of having the vaccine approved for use,” he said.

Asked if the state’s hubs plan concerned him, Sebesta said he wanted to ensure the county wasn’t forgotten.

“We just want to make sure we get our fair share,” he said, “and be able to get that to the citizens that want the vaccine.”

Keiser, the Galveston County official, said there appeared to be “not a lot of rhyme or reason” to the state’s distributi­on process. While some pharmacies in the county have received an allotment, he said, so had an oil refinery.

“No one really understand­s why places are chosen to get vaccines,” he said. “From our point of view, it seems very chaotic and random.”

If something doesn’t change in the near future, he warned, the county “could very well be in a situation” like the one in Los Angeles, where health officials recently said 10 people are testing positive for COVID-19, on average, every minute — about 10 percent of whom end up hospitaliz­ed.

“Our case count is rising, our hospitaliz­ation rate is rising, our death count is rising,” Keiser said. “We really just want to take good care of the people we are responsibl­e for.”

 ?? Brett Coomer / Staff photograph­er ?? Health care workers give out doses of a COVID-19 vaccine at a Memorial Hermann drive-thru site Thursday at NRG Park.
Brett Coomer / Staff photograph­er Health care workers give out doses of a COVID-19 vaccine at a Memorial Hermann drive-thru site Thursday at NRG Park.
 ?? Elizabeth Conley / Staff photograph­er ?? Vehicles line up at NRG Park as Texans get a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at a drive-thru Thursday. Anxious residents have been flooding medical providers with calls about getting the vaccines.
Elizabeth Conley / Staff photograph­er Vehicles line up at NRG Park as Texans get a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at a drive-thru Thursday. Anxious residents have been flooding medical providers with calls about getting the vaccines.

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