EL PASO, Texas – El Paso has been selected by the state of Texas to be a mega-vaccination center, and the community’s emergency management coordinator calls the initial launch ‘successful’.
El Paso assistant fire chief Jorge Rodriguez, who also serves as coordinator of emergency management operations in the city, updated El Paso County commissioners at a meeting Monday on the vaccination efforts.
Rodriguez said 1,300 people were vaccinated Sunday at a mega-site in El Paso. He expects another 1,500 people to be vaccinated in the coming days.
To date, El Paso has received 55.00 vaccines, with 33,160 people receiving their first dose and 4,996 fully vaccinated. There are currently 82,000 people registered to receive the vaccine via epstrong.org.
The University’s medical center received 5,000 of the vaccines sent by the state, and the city the other 5,000.
The hospital has also been selected as a mega-vaccination site and is currently working on a plan to carry out the vaccinations, UMC spokesman Ryan Mielke said. As ABC-7 reported on Sunday, the hospital opened online registration for the 5,000 vaccines and connected everyone to recipients within three hours, so the registration was closed.
“We have already started vaccinating some of the 5,000 (people),” Mielke told ABC-7 via SMS.
District Judge Ricardo Samaniego said UMC had begun their vaccination effort in the hospital but would move it to the El Paso County Coliseum soon.
Commissioner David Stout, also on the Covid-19 task force for the country, recommended opening four to five mega-sites to spread vaccines even faster. He suggested that the Cares Act funding be used for such an effort.
UTEP has also just been approved as a vaccine provider, and Stout has indicated that the university’s president, Heather Wilson, is ready to help with the vaccination by making UTEP a mega-website.