More Americans were supposed to be vaccinated against Covid-19 by now.
And according to the state's online count, as of New Year's Eve, nearly 300,000 Texans have gotten their first shot, from a supply of 773 thousand doses. The Baylor College of Medicine's Dr. Peter Hotez says Texas needs a different sort of infrastructure "which would include large tent areas where we could do high put through vaccination and that sort of thing. If all we're going to do is rely on HEB and Walgreens and CVS and private clinics and private doctors, we're just not going to make it."
Texas has a population of around 30 million. Hotez says that means we need to get 25 or so million vaccination out by the late summer or early fall. "That comes out to be about 100,000 Texans a day. I'm concerned that we don't have the infrastructure right now to meet that kind of benchmark."
Dr. Hotez says there has not been a strong national response to Covid-19 and the state's have fallen short. "The states don't have the horsepower to do big things in public health more often than not. We saw that with the diagnostic testing, we saw that with the virus genome surveillance and now we're seeing it with vaccinations."
He notes President-elect Biden spoke this week about federal intervention, especially in some low-income neighborhoods, which Hotez says are pharmacy deserts more often than not. "We're going to have to step up our game and with the refusal to do shutdowns and wear masks, we've backed ourselves into a corner. The only way we're going to solve the Covid-19 problem is to vaccinate our way of it. If we come up short on that, the devastation is just going to continue."
