The Starr County Memorial Hospital board and staff announced on Friday that the facility was designated a vaccine hub, one of the vaccine providers that the state is prioritizing for allocation.
Hospital Board President Dr. Jose Vazquez said the Texas Department of State Health Services reached out to the hospital on Thursday to see if they would be interested in becoming a hub.
“We of course said yes and we are going to be enrolling and receiving vaccines starting next week,” Vazquez said.
As part of the designation, the hospital will be receiving 1,000 vaccine doses on a weekly basis to be administered to individuals that fall under the Tier 1A or Tier 1B groups — health care workers, people 65 and older, and people 16 and older with a chronic medical condition.
Delivery of the vaccines could be as early as Monday, Vazquez said, and the hospital could administer the vaccines Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
The hospital is already administering 1,000 doses as part of a pilot program that began Thursday morning and is expected to end on Saturday.
“I think that this pilot program that we have just been conducting now over the last couple of days has given us enough experience about how are we going to be handling this weekly event now,” Vazquez said about how the hospital will adjust to the hub designation.
Vazquez added the hospital would likely request assistance from the county for clerical workers to register patients and to input information into ImmTrac2, the Texas Immunization Registry.
He added the hospital has also received help from South Texas College’s nursing school.
“The students are coming to do clinical rotations and it seems like they are very willing and eager to continue doing this for the weeks to come and to be helping us in this mass vaccination,” Vazquez said. “So this is a much appreciated help from STC as well as from the county.”
Vazquez said he felt that with that help, and assistance from the nursing staff sent by the state, would enable them to handle the operation.
The plan is to continue holding vaccination events at the hospital but he said they’ve been in talks with the county about opening substations to be located within the other county precincts — one in Roma, one in the La Grulla/Alto Bonito area, and one in San Isidro.
“We foresee that out of the 1,000 vaccines that we’re going to be getting weekly, we will be sending perhaps 200 to Roma, 200 to La Grulla/Alto Bonito area and maybe 100 to San Isidro for being a smaller community,” Vazquez said. “Once we see that perhaps communities like San Isidro may not need 100 vaccines on a weekly basis, then we will adjust accordingly.”
Starr County Judge Eloy Vera said Friday afternoon that he had not directly received confirmation that the hospital was officially designated a hub but said in preparation of that, the county would re-open their preregistration hotline.
“We plan to open it up because of the possibility of being a hub,” Vera said. “We’ll be taking registrations Monday at 1 p.m.”
For weeks, county officials pushed for more vaccine doses, expressing their disappointment that they were receiving a significantly lower allocation than neighboring Hidalgo and Cameron counties, both of which have vaccine hubs.
“The idea of becoming a hub and the idea of having secured a significant number of vaccines on a weekly basis is very, very important for our community,” Vazquez said. “Up until now, we have found tremendous difficulty in getting large numbers of vaccines.”
“So now,” he added, “the fact that we know that on a weekly basis we are going to have at least 1,000 vaccines comes to be a relief for our community.”
