winter storm

Power Outage Forces Texas Officials to Scramble to Administer COVID-19 Vaccine

"We got to work under the mission to avoid losing those vaccines with the loss of power, and we quickly put together a plan to allocate and to salvage them"

NBC Universal, Inc.

Health officials in Texas scrambled Monday to administer more than 5,000 COVID-19 vaccines after the deadly winter storm pummeling the state caused a power outage in a facility storing the doses, NBC News reported.

A backup generator at the Harris County Health Department failed, thawing freezers that kept a total of 8,430 doses of the Moderna vaccine, according to Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo.

"We got to work under the mission to avoid losing those vaccines with the loss of power, and we quickly put together a plan to allocate and to salvage them," she said during a press conference. “We were looking for places where there were already large numbers of people.”

Of the 8,430 vaccines, county health officials distributed 5,410 doses to five locations, including 3,000 to the Harris County Jail, 1,000 to Houston Methodist Hospital, 810 to Rice University, and 600 to Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital and Ben Taub Hospital, Hidalgo said.

Read the full story at NBCNews.com.

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