Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott joined The Daily Briefing on Friday to discuss how the Lone Star State became the first in the country to administer one million doses of the coronavirus vaccine.
Abbott told hostess Dana Perino that Texas decided to allow all residents 65 and older to receive the first dose of the vaccine and opened 28 mass vaccination centers that could administer more than 4,000 vaccines at each location.
GOV. GREG ABBOTT: We were able to make two main pivots that allowed Texas to achieve what we have done now. It is important to note that to date, we have vaccinated more than 1.1 million Texans and, equally importantly, more than 61% of the vaccines assigned to us have been administered to Texans.
How were we able to do that? Two important things. One is that we changed the strategy before other states and before the United States started recommending that we start vaccinating people 65 and older.
TEXAS EXCEEDS 2M CORONAVIRUS CASES, SECOND HIGHEST IN THE USA
Texas went ahead and made that decision knowing that it would increase the number of people who could be vaccinated and, more importantly, the number of people who would be more likely to lose their lives by contracting COVID.
Second, we set up these mass vaccination centers last weekend, and this week, we have 28 mass vaccination centers across the state of Texas, where they are able to do 1,000 to 3,000, maybe sometimes 4,000 vaccinations per day in any specific location …
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We visit our fellow governors all the time about different strategies, be it vaccines or tests and other things. One thing we’ve seen throughout the pandemic is that governors work together very collaboratively. We all learn from each other. We learned best practices and, as you can see from what the governor of Georgia was saying, the state of Georgia now realizes that expanding to adults aged 65 and over is a good strategy for providing more vaccines to more people in each state.