According to the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), the State eclipsed two major COVID vaccination milestones last week. Texas passed both the 5 and 6-million mark for doses of vaccines administered.
“Now when we break that down, that’s 3.9 million who have gotten at least one dose and 2.1 million people are fully vaccinated,” said Associate Commissioner Imelda Garcia in their weekly news conference.
The priority of phase 1b vaccination eligibility continues to be older Texans. Garcia said that 46-percent of 65+ Texans have received at least their first does of the vaccine.
“More than a quarter of all seniors are now fully vaccinated, and when we’re looking at the broader population, more than one-in-six Texans 16-and-up have gotten at least one dose,” said Garcia.
Texas is slated to receive more than one million doses of a combination of the Pfizer, Moderna and now the recently FDA approved Johnson & Johnson vaccines next week. Garcia said they will also be distributing them more widely throughout the state.
“Those doses will go to more than 16-hundred individual providers,” Garcia said. “That’s hundreds more than what we’ve been able to provide vaccine to in a single week…more than ever before.”
The addition of the single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine is also making DSHS optimistic about the fight against the virus that already claimed the lives of more than 44-thousand Texans.
“Just yesterday we saw the first few shipments arrive here in Texas, with 24-thousand doses being divided among the three federally supported sites (in Harris, Dallas and Tarrant Counties),” said Garcia. “They’ll get those again next week and we will be able to allocate more than 220-thousand doses of Johnson & Johnson in the coming week.”
As reported by DSHS on Wednesday, due to directives from the Biden administration, has added school officials and child care personnel to the State’s COVID eligibility list.
The federal directive defines the people eligible as “those who work in pre-primary, primary, and secondary schools, as well as Head Start and Early Head Start programs (including teachers, staff, and bus drivers) and those who work as or for licensed child care providers, including center-based and family care providers.”