Texas officials have cut the number of COVID-19 shots to Dallas residents, the county says

Provincial officials said Friday the number of first-dose COVID-19 vaccines for Dallas and Tarrant County residents will be reduced next week.

Judge Clay Jenkins, county of Dallas, said the state reduced the approximately 40,000 doses allocated to residents of DFW next week to approximately 20,000 because the provinces of Dallas and Tarrant receive approximately 20,000 shots from FEMA.

But the extra FEMA shots are only for residents in 17 economically disadvantaged zip codes, Jenkins said.

That means fewer shots will be available to North Texas residents in need who live outside the 17 zip codes, he said.

The state’s ruling will affect the province’s vaccination for the next three weeks, Jenkins said.

“Those were extra doses to help more Texans,” Jenkins said Friday night. “We should not be punished because we are trying to get more vaccines.”

Department of Health Services spokesman Chris Van Deusen said Dallas County “will be more or less equal to what it has been for the past few weeks.”

The province was ‘allocated on the basis of its share of the population’, he said.

“So it was an opportunity for us to catch up with other parts of the state that have not yet been vaccinated.”

State-authorized vaccines have so far struggled to vaccinate black and Hispanic residents living in zip codes that do not have a healthcare ecosystem, including doctors and pharmacies.

Black and Hispanic Texans died disproportionately from the most severe symptoms of COVID-19. Nationally, there is a chance that blacks and Spaniards will contract the virus as a result of their jobs and homes with many families and multi-generations.

Whoever receives the life-saving doses has become a political fault line in Dallas, sparking debates in both City Hall and the provincial administration building. Dallas officials have promised that their Fair Park site, which opened in January, will give preference to Black and Spanish residents living below Interstate 30, a long-established dividing line between race and socio-economic status in one of the country’s ten largest provinces.

Both Dallas and Tarrant officials hoped the new surplus of federal government shots would allow them to use doses allocated separately by the state to flood neighborhoods with mobile units and pop-up vaccine sites.

Jenkins said the state has received more shots from the federations in the past than he expected.

Federal officials have stressed that FEMA sites are expected to target the region’s most vulnerable to coronavirus and hard-to-reach populations.