Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott joined The Daily Briefing on Friday to discuss how the Lone Star State became the first in the country to administer one million doses of coronavirus vaccine.
Abbott told host Dana Perino Texas had decided to allow all residents 65 and older to receive the first dose of the vaccine, and opened 28 mass vaccination centers that could administer more than 4,000 stitches at each location.
GOV. GREG ABBOTT: We were able to make two key pivots that enable Texas to achieve what we are doing now. It is important that as of today, we have vaccinated more than 1.1 million Texans, and just as importantly, that more than 61% of the vaccines granted to us have been administered to Texans.
How could we do that? Two important things. One is that we changed the strategy before other states and before the United States started ordering us to start vaccinating people 65 and older.
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Texas went ahead and made the decision itself, knowing that it would increase the pool of people who would be vaccinated, and very importantly, the pool of people who would likely lose their lives as a result of COVID.
Second, we set up these mass vaccination centers this past weekend, and this week we have 28 mass vaccination centers in the state of Texas where they are able to do 1,000 to 3,000, maybe sometimes 4,000 vaccinations a day at any particular location. …
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We visit all the time with our fellow governors about different strategies, whether it be the vaccines or testing and other things. One thing we have seen throughout the course of the pandemic is that the governors are cooperating a lot. We all learn from each other. We learn best practices, and as you can see from what the governor of Georgia just talked about, the state of Georgia now realizes that expanding to adults 65 and older is a great strategy to get more vaccines to more people in each state. to offer.