Why some rural North Texas COVID vaccine providers are still waiting for first doses
Cody Powell, the Wise County emergency management coordinator, has spent every Friday for the past six weeks checking his email and refreshing the Texas Department of State Health Services website, waiting for the state’s latest vaccine shipment list.
“We’re at the will of the state,” Powell said. “There’s really no way of knowing where or when the vaccines will be allocated.”
The state has been focused on mass vaccination sites, leaving rural county residents with no option but to travel to urban areas to get a vaccine.
Officials from the Department of State Health Services Region 3, which stretches from Palo Pinto County to Kaufman County in North Texas, said they have waited weeks to get vaccines. Some are nowhere close to vaccinating all health care workers and first responders. At least two dozen vaccine providers in the region, including hospitals, pharmacies and doctor’s clinics, had not received their first vaccine as of Jan. 16.
Mass vaccination sites
Gary Dorman, 76, of Weatherford has a notebook with dozens of places he’s called and registered with in the past month trying to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Dorman was one of the first to get a vaccine in Parker County’s hub, which opened Thursday.
“I tried Tarrant County but I would have drove to Childress that’s 224 miles or Jacksboro but I couldn’t get an appointment,” said Dorman, a veteran and former employee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“This whole thing has been unorganized, mismanaged. The state is not there trying to help coordinate this, it’s been botched from the get-go. This vaccine has to be everywhere ... I hope FEMA gets involved because they have the experience.”
Tarrant and Dallas counties, with a combined population of 4.73 million, have received 307,350 vaccines from the state. The other 16 counties in the region, with 3.21 million people, have gotten 97,675. About half of vaccines allocated in Tarrant and Dallas County, 142,625, went to mass vaccination sites or hubs.
Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley said mass vaccination sites are a quicker way to get the vaccines “in the arms of those who need it the most” because most rural counties don’t have a health district or the resources to administer shots en masse. At the request of state officials, Whitley reached out to some of the surrounding counties earlier this month to remind them they can send their residents to any of the hubs in Tarrant County or any other provider in Texas.
While some rural county officials embrace the idea of hubs, not all agree with the state’s vaccine rollout.
“If that’s the way they plan to get people in rural areas vaccinated, no one has told me,” Powell said. “We need to find ways to reach them not the other way around.”
The Texas Department of State Health Services did not respond to a request for comment. In December, the department established a COVID-19 Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel to develop strategies to allocate the vaccine to recommend to the Texas commissioner of health.
Not Enough Vaccines
Mari Gosept bears the brunt of answering phone calls from concerned citizens asking where they can find vaccines in Parker County.
“The vaccines ran out so fast that people were frustrated,” said Gosept, administrative assistant for the fire marshal/emergency management coordinator.
“For the most part, providers didn’t have a waiting list for people to even sign up so the only thing they could do was continue calling back.”
On Thursday, Parker County, in collaboration with the county health district, opened a hub with the goal of vaccinating 2,000 people a week. Sean Hughes, Parker County’s emergency management coordinator, hopes the hub will not only alleviate the calls to his office from frustrated residents but also help administer some vaccines to the surrounding rural areas.
“The problem is not that we can’t administer these vaccines,” Hughes said. “It’s that we don’t have enough vaccines.”
In the first five weeks, the mostly rural county of more than 142,000 people received 1,400 vaccines. The vaccines were distributed directly from the state to approved pharmacies and health care providers. Ten of the 17 providers that signed up received a shipment.
The Parker County Hospital District, a nonprofit health care provider that administers 18,000 flu-shots every year across the county, received the most vaccines.
“We have the staff, we have the deep freezers, we have the relationships with the community and county government, we just need more vaccines,” said Randy Bacus, who heads the district.
The district received 400 doses between Dec. 12 and Jan. 16, but 1,950 this week, so it could set up a vaccination hub in Weatherford. The doses will not be enough to vaccinate the 5,000 people on the waiting list, but Bacus and Hughes said shipments will remain consistent every week.
The district also plans to allocate vaccines to providers in the county and launch mobile vaccinations soon, according to Bacus.
Front-line health care workers and residents at long-term care facilities, people 65 or older and those with a chronic medical condition are eligible to receive the COVID‑19 vaccine.
Approximately 52,000 people in Parker County are in those categories, known as phase 1a (health care workers and first responders) and 1b (those 65 and older and those with health conditions).
Stuck to the plan
In Comanche County, an hour-and-half drive southwest of Weatherford, health care providers have been out of vaccines for several weeks, according to Tricia Grimshaw, the emergency management coordinator.
“We have a waiting list of over 1,000 people,” Grimshaw said. “The 500 vaccines we received were gone in two or three days.”
More than 5,800 people in Comanche County fall into the 1a and 1b groups, and 500 of them are health care workers, according to state data. First responders and essential workers are being vaccinated by the county while hospitals and pharmacies are in charge of those who are 65 and older or immunocompromised, according to Grimshaw.
The original plan in Texas and in most states was to vaccinate health care workers and long-term care residents before moving on to anyone else. But on Dec. 29, state health officials instructed providers to start vaccinating those 65 and older and those with health conditions after Gov. Greg Abbott suggested that vaccines may be languishing on hospital shelves.
The problem was a lag in data of shots being administered, according to the Texas Tribune.
Some county officials, including Whitley of Tarrant County, said despite not having sufficient vaccines to complete phase 1a, they felt like they did not have a choice but to start phase 1b. But officials in Palo Pinto County decided to stick with the original plan. As of Jan. 16, all health care workers had been vaccinated in the county, according to emergency management coordinator Mistie Moon.
“We’re out of vaccines but at least we’ve made some progress,” Moon said. “Honestly, it’s been relatively easy despite some confusion early on.”
The confusion has been with the state, which does not inform officials when or where the next shipment of vaccines will arrive, Moon said. “There’s really no way of planning ahead,” Moon said. “All we can tell people is to wait patiently.”
