On December 11, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved on an emergency basis the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. Moderna’s vaccine was also approved shortly after by the FDA. Immediately after the approvals, the Texas Health and Human Services began distributing the two approved vaccines to Texas communities. Each state is responsible for the distribution of the vaccine.
The Texas Health and Human Services began allocating the vaccines starting on Tuesday, December 15, 2020 on a weekly basis. The first doses for El Paso totaled 6,825 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The majority, 2,925 were delivered to the University Medical Center of El Paso (UMC). The other 3,900 doses were allocated in doses of 975 to four other medical facilities.
The following week, ending on December 25, another 17,550 doses were made available to El Paso residents. These were a combination of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
This week, ending on January 1, 2021, another 1,300 vaccines have been delivered to El Paso medical facilities according to the Texas data most recently released.
In total, there have been 25,675 doses delivered to 36 El Paso medical facilities. Of those, 16,900 were of the Moderna (66%) vaccine and 8,775 were Pfizer (34%).
UMC has received the largest allotment at 6,675 doses. Texas Tech has received 2,000 doses.
The following table lists the vaccine allocations for El Paso, as of today.
According to the Texas Health and Human Services vaccine dashboard, as of last night, 12,411 individuals have received the first dose of the vaccine. None have received the second required dose to be considered vaccinated.
There are two discrepancies El Paso Politics has found. The first is that, assuming that El Paso is holding half of its vaccine allotment for the second dose there remains about 425 doses that have not been reported. Also, the state’s health services data has a discrepancy of 1,200 doses between the data published from its distribution center and that reported by the dashboard. The dashboard reports that 26,875 doses have been allocated to El Paso while the number of doses reported to have been delivered to local providers total 25,675.
It remains unclear why the state’s data reports two different sets of doses.
El Paso Politics will continue to monitor the vaccine distribution and report new information as it become available.
