DALLAS — The city of Dallas expects to receive a shipment of 5,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses Tuesday morning.
Distribution of those doses should begin about 48 hours later, at 10 a.m. Thursday, at a drive-thru clinic set up at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in downtown Dallas.
This will mark the first time the city has administered the vaccine to the general public.
The city will be vaccinating people who are currently on Dallas County’s waiting list, which City of Dallas Emergency Management Coordinator Rocky Vaz says is now almost 400,000 names long.
There is not a separate registration for the city. Here is the link to get your name on the county's COVID-19 vaccine waiting list. Click on the green bar in the middle of that page.
Dallas County has given the city a list of 8,000 to 10,000 names of people who are next in line based on a vulnerability index.
The city will handle notifying people who are eligible to get the vaccine at the Kay Bailey Hutchison drive-thru site.
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Several members of the Dallas city council called a special meeting Monday night to talk about vaccine distribution after several said they learned about the city receiving the allocation through a news release from the mayor’s office.
Mayor Eric Johnson said the meeting was “not the most productive use of time,” as he called it to order.
Councilmembers said there is widespread confusion among their constituents about how to get a vaccine and how to register on a waiting list.
Over a period of four days, community activist Leslie Cannon helped organize multiple registration drives in the 75211 ZIP code for people who didn’t otherwise know how to register.
“I thought people were not signing up because they didn’t know the registration was open, but that’s not what I ran into,” Cannon said. “The majority of these individuals do not have Wi-Fi at home.”
“They have Wi-Fi or internet through their grandkid’s phones or their children’s phones, but they don’t have it themselves," she said.
Cannon’s registration drives drew large crowds, with people waiting in line for hours in cold rain just to get their names on the waiting list.
Volunteers sat at tables with iPads, laptops and iPhones and entered names on the county’s registration site.
The efforts were all run by volunteers, but Vaz said the city is working to provide assistance to volunteers willing to host similar neighborhood registration drives in all city council districts.
“Our push right now is to make sure we get people registered,” Vaz said. “If they don’t register, they’re not in the system. They’re not in the cue to get vaccines.”
Cannon said she hopes to see increased communication and coordination from all involved in vaccine distribution.
“If we’re asking the community to come together and sign up our neighbors, the very least is our elected officials can do the same,” Cannon said.