There was some heated finger pointing of blame at tonight s meeting. All of a sudden the judge wrote a letter to the state objecting to it and then all of a sudden the state sends this veiled threat, Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price said in an interview after the meeting. Commissioner Koch with all due respect rather than you trying to guess what s okay with the state you got us in the situation we are in tonight, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said during the meeting. Your dealings with the state up to this point has been quite disingenuous, Dallas County Commissioner J.J. Koch said to Judge Jenkins during the meeting. You made clear to the state that we were shutting people out entirely that weren t in those ZIP codes and that was not the case.
It turns out distributing a vaccine is tough work, especially when city and county officials aren t talking to each other. Drama broke out last week between Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson and Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins over how inoculations were being delivered at the mega center in Fair Park.
Poor communication between the Trump administration and the states also added to confusion over who can get a vaccine and when nationally, according to a report in
The Washington Post.
Dallas residents were initially told they needed to be registered and have an appointment to be vaccinated at the mega center in Fair Park. However, in a letter obtained by
Rolling out the COVID-19 vaccine is neither for the faint of heart nor the poorly organized. Local public health authorities, hospitals and other providers have had to figure out where to store the vaccine, how to sign up people, how to alert them about their place in line, how to set up vaccination sites that prevent contagion and how to manage long outdoor lines dotted with seniors and disabled residents.
The great hurdle is the fact that there is not enough vaccine to go around at this moment - not even for vulnerable populations eligible to receive it now, let alone the public at large.