DALLAS — Michael Harris was frustrated when WFAA first spoke with him on July 20.
He was repeatedly contacting the Dallas County health department to see if he could get a monkeypox vaccine.
“I’d hate to have it and pass it on to somebody else,” he said.
But the health department continually told him he didn’t qualify.
Days later, he and his roommate flew to Florida and got the vaccine.
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“I have friends in Austin, Houston, San Antonio having the same problem,” he said.
Dallas County received just over 5,000 doses of the vaccine last week, but health director Dr. Philip Huang said that won’t come close to meeting demand.
“It’s still not a lot of doses,” Huang said during a virtual panel discussion Wednesday evening organized by Dallas councilmember Omar Narvaez and Dallas state representative Jessica Gonzalez.
The county has launched a monkeypox hotline, 972-692-2780, but on the website is a disclaimer warning callers they may encounter difficulties because of a high number of calls. The hotline is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The doses are now being distributed by some community clinics and health agencies, but doses are limited and appointments fill up fast.
Prism Health CEO Dr. John Carlo said as soon as they opened their phone lines for vaccines, the phones “rang off the hook.”
“We think after about an hour, close to an hour here today, we've really pretty much booked up all of our appointments,” he said.
The county has slightly expanded eligibility beyond those who have confirmed cases.
Now, Dallas County will vaccinate anyone who has had skin-to-skin or intimate contact with a positive case or men who’ve had sex with men who have had multiple recent partners
On the panel Wednesday night, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said eligibility is limited because of a nationwide vaccine shortage.
“We don’t have as much vaccine as we need to have,” he said.
Dallas County has more monkeypox cases than any county in Texas, and Jenkins said the county is working to obtain additional doses.
Once they do, eligibility will be revised.
“We understand people are nervous, scared, and that people don’t understand -- I was that person about three or four weeks ago,” said Narvaez.
Narvaez said he wanted to make sure people know monkey pox is not transmissible at the same speed that COVID is, but he reiterated that anyone can get it.
“It is not just a gay man’s virus, or something spread among men who have sex with men,” he said.
“This is a virus that just happened to start in this community which I’m a member of, and it’s something we need to get under control.”