Texas authorities cut COVID-19 shots for Dallas residents, county says

The number of first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine for residents of Dallas County and Tarrant next week will be cut in half due to a state decision, county officials said on Friday.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said the state reduced the roughly 40,000 doses allocated to DFW residents next week to about 20,000 because Dallas and Tarrant counties were receiving about 20,000 injections of FEMA.

But these additional FEMA snapshots are only for residents of 17 economically disadvantaged postcodes, Jenkins said.

That means fewer photos will be available for needy North Texas residents who live outside of those 17 zip codes, he said.

The state’s decision affects the county’s vaccine allocation for the next three weeks, Jenkins said.

“These were extra doses to help more Texans,” Jenkins said Friday night. “We shouldn’t be punished for trying to get more vaccines.”

State Department Health Services Commission spokesperson Chris Van Deusen said Dallas County would be “more or less on par with what it has been in recent weeks.”

The county has “been overused based on its share of the population,” he said.

“So this was an opportunity for us to help catch up with other parts of the state that had not been vaccinated.”

State-licensed vaccination centers have so far struggled to vaccinate black and Hispanic residents who live in zip codes with no health care ecosystem, including doctors and pharmacies.

Black and Hispanic Texans have died disproportionately from the most severe symptoms of COVID-19. Nationally, blacks and Hispanics are more likely to contract the virus because of their jobs and their multi-family, multi-generational homes.

Who gets life-saving doses has become a political fault line in Dallas, sparking debate both at city hall and the county administration building. Dallas officials have promised their Fair Park site, which opened in January, would prioritize black and Hispanic residents living under Interstate 30, a long-established line between race and status. socio-economic in one of the 10 largest counties in the country.

Officials in Dallas and Tarrant had hoped that the federal government’s new vaccine surplus would allow them to use separately allocated doses by the state to flood neighborhoods with mobile units and pop-up vaccination sites.

Jenkins said the state has in the past received more gunfire from the federal government than it expected.

Federal officials stressed that FEMA sites should target populations most vulnerable to coronavirus and hard-to-reach populations in the region.