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The street was practically empty, save for some media crews, when a delivery truck carrying the COVID-19 vaccine rolled up at the UT Health Austin Dell Medical School a few hours after sunrise on Monday.
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“Today is a very exciting day,” said Amy Young, chief clinical officer at the facility. “It’s a huge shot in the arm.”
The Dell Medical School was among four Texas sites that received a total of 19,500 doses of the vaccine on Monday, the first phase of a rollout that will put a quarter-million doses into 109 Texas facilities this week — with more on the way next week, said Chris Van Deusen, spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Texas is slated for 1.4 million doses allocated through the end of the year.
It was a quiet, almost anti-climactic landing for the vaccine in Austin, the arrival of which signaled the first real hope that the pandemic ravaging the state and the nation for nearly a year could finally be on its way out — along with the physical, mental and economic despair left in its wake.
The virus has claimed the lives of nearly 24,000 Texans and nearly 300,000 nationwide, and the anxious anticipation of the vaccine’s arrival cannot be overstated — particularly among Texas’ front-line health workers, who will be in the “first tier” of recipients and who sacrificed their safety to save the lives of others even as they deal with their own tragedies.
Injections have already begun at Methodist Dallas Medical Center, hours after its 5,850 doses arrived on UPS trucks around 8 a.m. Monday, according to the Dallas Morning News, and social media accounts from health care workers.
In Houston, the vaccine showed up before dawn at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.
In San Antonio, UT Health San Antonio received 5,800 doses early Monday and plans to begin vaccinating 1,000 health care workers a day starting Tuesday, according to a Tweet by officials at the site.
Another 75,075 doses will be arriving at 19 sites in 12 cities on Tuesday, including facilities in Edinburg, El Paso, San Angelo, Corpus Christi, Galveston, Amarillo and Lubbock, among others. Many of the early facilities are at universities.
Vaccine doses for the remaining 86 sites will begin shipping later in the week, he said.
More vaccines are expected to arrive in Texas the week of Dec. 21, likely including doses from Pfizer and Moderna, whose vaccine is expected to get federal approval by the end of this week, Van Deusen said.
“We anticipate that over the next 10 days, we will vaccinate approximately 2,900 health care providers that are on the state tiers for priority,” Young said. “This is the first step toward the future and returning to some sort of normalcy for the health care environment and eventually for all of our country and our population.”
She and other health care officials said it’s important that the population remembers to continue social distancing, mask-wearing and hand-washing practices until the general population can be vaccinated to the point where the virus is no longer spreading. The timeline for that could stretch for several more months, experts say.
Photographer Jordan Vonderhaar contributed to this report.
Disclosure: Dell, MD Anderson Cancer Center and UT Health have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.