Harris Health’s shots to run out
With COVID-19 rates rising in the Houston area, the Harris Health System, the county’s medical safety net, is set to run out of vaccines by Friday.
Hundreds of appointments scheduled for Friday will be canceled, said Dr. Esmaeil Porsa, Harris Health’s CEO. While the system is scheduled to receive an additional 1,000 doses by the end of Thursday, that’s not enough to cover the 1,500 people on Friday’s schedule.
“We scheduled appointments every day with the hope and expectation we’d have the supply to fulfill those,” Porsa said.
The last of Harris Health’s vaccine allocation will be administered at an outpatient surgery clinic by noon.
Harris Health’s flagship hospitals, Ben Taub and Lyndon B. Johnson, were each allocated 1,950 doses of the vaccines in a distribution at the beginning of the month. State data shows that the hospital system did not receive vaccines in the most recent round of distribution. It has received more than 21,000 doses since the state started divvying up doses in December, and it administers vaccines at several clinics in addition to the hospitals.
The announcement comes amid a nationwide scramble for vaccine. “Right now the state of Texas gets about 330,000 doses per week, but we have 30 million Texans,” said Dr. David Lakey, a member of the scientific panel that advises the state on vaccine allocation. “That 330,000 doses is not what we need.”
“We need more vaccine,” said
Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine researcher at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. By his rough calculation, for Harris County to reach “herd immunity” in the next six months, it would have to give two doses of vaccine to 3.6 million of its 4.8 million residents — around 40,000 doses per day. That’s more vaccine than is being allotted to the entire state.
Increasingly, Hotez notes, Texas appears to be the state bearing the worst of the pandemic. “Texas is the new frontier,” he said, referring to a map that shows the virus’ rate of change over seven days. As cases drop in much of the U.S., they’re rising across the state — including the Houston area. “It looks like our time is coming,” he said. Porsa said Harris Health receives little notification before a shipment of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines shows up at its loading docks. Harris Health tentatively plans to keep appointments scheduled for Monday, but if it doesn’t receive a shipment during the weekend, those will be canceled and rescheduled for a later, unknown date.
Harris Health appealed to the Texas Department of State Health Services on Wednesday for more vials but has not heard back.
The state has been hampered by the speed of vaccine production and allotments from the federal government to Texas, said Lara Anton, a DSHS spokesperson.
Texans have been scrambling through any channel they can to get the COVID-19 vaccine in their arms since the state announced Dec. 28 that people 65 and older or between the ages of 16 and 65 with a chronic illness qualified for vaccines. More than 1.5 million Texans have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to a Chronicle data analysis.
This month, Texas announced an effort to streamline the immunization process by delivering most doses to “vaccination hubs,” where local health departments and hospitals could immunize more people in one place and simplify the sign-up process.
“Because the supply is limited, it is not possible to send vaccine to every non-hub-approved provider each week,” Anton said.
Harris Health is not an approved hub.
“Not knowing day to day or week to week what the supply is going to be has been extremely challenging,” Porsa said.