DALLAS — Texas vaccinations have flatlined, and doses arriving in the state aren’t expected to increase this week.
“We've told the state we'll take as much as they can give us,” Dallas County Health Director Dr. Phil Huang said.
Huang thinks the county’s Fair Park vaccine hub could do 1,000 vaccinations an hour. Right now, they’re doing 2,000 a day and ran out before this week ended.
“We've told the state we can handle more, so it's hard,” Huang said. “I would like to be much further along.”
According to the state department of health services, Dallas County will get 42,325 first doses across all providers, Tarrant County will receive 26,050, Collin County will get 10,600 and Denton County will be shipped 10,250. In total, 332,750 first doses will make it to Texas, compared to 333,650 last week.
President Joe Biden set a goal of 100 million vaccinations in 100 days.
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“That may be too low to actually hit any level of protection or immunity,” said Dr. Emanuel George, a UNTHSC Pharmacy professor.
According to CDC data, the U.S. has hit that goal four days in a row as of Sunday. George thinks 1.7 million a day should be the goal and that pharmacies could help with fair distribution in all communities, including those with limited internet and transportation access.
“I think they're the under-tapped resource that would allow full-scale distribution,” George said. “There are 26,000 pharmacists in the state of Texas alone. You know, that is a lot of capacity to be able to actually immunize and affect a significant change.”
The problem, though, is supply.
“That allocation piece is the real challenge for these institutions, hospitals, community pharmacies to really plan their staffing,” he said. “If they have it haphazard on how much — I'm getting 20 this week, I don't get one the next week. Again, it just makes it very difficult for planning.”
Tarrant County got DSHS approval to give 25-50 percent of its doses a day to at-risk ZIP codes and the remaining doses to the rest of its waitlist. Dallas County’s prioritization plan was shot down by the state, but they plan to continue to use a scoring system created by Parkland to figure out appointments now.
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“Every person is getting a score with that vulnerability index,” Huang said. “It's helping to prioritize them based on the latest information.”
Huang says they’re looking at a drive-thru site like what the city of Dallas is setting up later this week as well as using QR codes for quicker verifications.
“We're definitely continuing to see how we can make things more efficient,” Huang said.
Texas is averaging about 62,000 vaccinations a day. At that rate, it’ll be the summer of 2022 before the state is vaccinated.
“Just if you do that math, that's going to take a while,” Huang said.
New vaccine approvals from Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca could happen in March, and there’s hope Moderna and Pfizer supply will increase.
With COVID-19 deaths at record levels, there’s no time to be patient.