FORT WORTH (1080 KRLD) - With a COVID-19 vaccine possibly being available in two months, cities throughout North Texas and across the country are getting ready.
Fort Worth Fire Chief Jim Davis says the city has been preparing for decades.
“The Fort Worth Fire Department with the emergency operation center of the city has had a mass vaccination plan for several years post-9/11, with all of the issues surrounding weapons of mass destruction and the concern of that,” says Chief Davis.
Such preparation is not unique to Fort Worth.
“Most major cities have put together mass vaccination programs, where they can get vaccines out quickly to the public once it's determined that the need occurs,” Davis says.
Fort Worth is using its expanded COVID-19 testing and this year’s flu vaccine as more or less a dry run for a mass COVID-19 vaccination operation.
“Our plan is to learn from that experience, to try to actually maximize our opportunity to turn the vaccines out quickly when and if they're made available to us,” says Davis. “We've learned a lot from our testing programs, and so we're revising our plans based on things that we’ve learned from those testing sites.”