CUERO Three weeks after Sandra Brazil received her first dose of the coronavirus vaccine, it was her 90-year-old mother s turn. They drove the 17 miles together from their home in Yoakum to Cuero, where Josephine Brazil got a shot and a glimmer of hope of seeing her son and other family members again. It is a blessing, Brazil said as she waited for her mother outside of the Cuero Municipal Park Clubhouse on a recent Friday. I was praying and asking for a solution for the people so that we wouldn t have so many casualties.
She was among 100 DeWitt County residents to receive the first dose of the Moderna vaccine at a mobile vaccination unit, one of 15 dispatched by state health officials to rural areas with little or no access to vaccines. Still, despite the effort, the vaccine landscape is much different in small-town Texas than in the state s big cities.
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By Karen Brooks Harper, The Texas Tribune Jan. 8, 2021
More than two dozen hospitals in rural Texas, from the Panhandle to South Texas, are still waiting on doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to distribute to their front-line workers and community members, hospitals and health care advocates say.
Those that are lucky enough to be near another provider with shots available are relying on neighborly generosity encouraged but not mandated by the state to inoculate front-line workers, who are sometimes dealing with overflow patients from urban areas alongside their own coronavirus patients.
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But many small, rural providers don t have neighbors with doses to spare, leaving them waiting or scrambling to find vaccine for their most high-risk front-line health workers, even as other counties have reportedly distributed excess vaccine doses to politicians and healthy members of the public.
More than two dozen of Texas’ rural hospitals haven’t received any COVID-19 vaccines
Texas Tribune
Tags: David Lee, chief executive officer at Otto Kaiser Memorial Hospital in Kenedy speaks with staff in the ER. Lee said they are are luckier than many to have the local H-E-B pharmacy and hospitals in Cuero and Floresville that were willing to help inoculate a few dozen workers at his hospital.
Credit: Chris Stokes for The Texas Tribune
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Those that are lucky enough to be near another provider with shots available are relying on neighborly generosity encouraged but not mandated by the state to inoculate front-line workers, who are sometimes dealing with overflow patients from urban areas alongside their own coronavirus patients.