Three new major community vaccination centers will open in Dallas, Arlington and Houston, Texas, Covid-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients announced on Wednesday.
Together, these sites will be able to administer more than 10,000 Covid-19 vaccines per day, said Zients, and will begin vaccination from the week of February 22.
The community’s vaccination sites will be located at NRG Stadium in Houston, AT&T Stadium in Arlington and Fair Park in Dallas, according to Zients. The White House is immediately deploying federal teams to work with state and local officials, he said.
Later on Wednesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, announced a federal partnership to open two new mass vaccination sites in Queens and Brooklyn.
Both vaccination sites – one at York College, Jamaica, Queens, and the other at Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn – will administer approximately 3,000 vaccinations a day. These sites will open the same week that the Texas sites open.
The announcement comes as the Biden government tries to increase production and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines amid a pandemic that continues to devastate the country. Both ads emphasized the focus on distributing vaccination equitably across the country and to underprivileged and vulnerable populations.
“They will address a dramatic need to get the vaccine to the people who need it most,” said Cuomo of the new vaccination sites.
The Biden government said last week that the federal government would partner with California to launch two new community vaccination centers in communities that have been hard hit by the pandemic. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is establishing two vaccination sites in Oakland and eastern Los Angeles that will open next Tuesday, said FEMA interim administrator Bob Fenton.
“We are creating more places where Americans can be vaccinated,” Zients said in an interview on Wednesday. “To that end, we have streamlined financial support to strengthen community vaccination centers across the country with more than $ 3 billion in federal funding in 35 states, tribes and territories.”
Last week, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell wrote a letter to Biden offering to use all of the team’s stadiums as a mass vaccination site. Biden told CBS in an interview that aired Sunday that he intended to accept Goodell’s offer.
In addition to the stadiums, Zients said the government is building new vaccination centers across the country “from scratch” in community centers, school academies and parking lots.
The White House also announced this week that it would increase the overall weekly supply of vaccines to 11 million doses nationwide starting this week. After announcing a plan to send vaccines directly to retail pharmacies, the White House said it would send part of the Covid-19 vaccine supply directly to community health centers starting next week, as part of an effort to reach underserved areas.
“We are putting equity in the front and center, partnering with states to increase vaccination in the most affected and hardest to reach communities,” said Zients on Wednesday, reiterating the government’s focus on equity.
There are two Covid-19 vaccines that have received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration: one from Pfizer / BioNTech and the other from Moderna. Both require two doses administered several weeks apart to achieve almost 95% effectiveness.
If the FDA authorizes a Johnson & Johnson vaccine for emergency use, there are expected to be less than 10 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine available, confirms a federal health official.
CNN reported for the first time that this would be the amount of vaccine available after authorization on February 1.
The official said the number of doses available would be in the millions of single digits, if authorized in the coming weeks. That number would increase to double-digit millions in March, but still less than 20 million doses. They hope to increase to 20 or 30 million doses by April.
Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 single dose vaccine was shown to be 66% effective in preventing moderate and severe illnesses in a global Phase 3 trial, but 85% effective against serious illnesses, the company announced on Friday. The vaccine was 72% effective against moderate and severe illnesses in the USA.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and DJ Judd contributed to this report.