CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — There are organizations working to provide rural communities with the COVID-19 vaccination supplies they need. One of them is the Community Action Corporation of South Texas, and they plan to hold vaccine clinics across the Coastal Bend.
Executive Director Dr. Ann Awalt and her team of medical experts held a virtual meeting Wednesday to lay out the plans of the Community Action Corporation, a private non-profit that has clinics in a number of Coastal Bend communities.
"We've located sites in these counties to do mass community drive-thru's, but we will also be doing, at the same time, vaccinating patients we have that fall within those priority categories," Awalt said.
Members of her team were at the Nueces County mass vaccination site on Tuesday. They were learning how that operation was being run in an effort to have a better idea of how to setup their own vaccination clinics out in the rural counties. Those, of course, will be on a much smaller scale.
"We also visited that big operation in Robstown that they had yesterday, yesterday and the day before," Dr. Vandana Kamat said. "We were in there yesterday. We got some good cues from them. Judge Canales was there and her team, and they let us in to see their whole operation."
Awalt said her organization has six clinics in the Coastal Bend. She also said that she set aside some of those CARES Act dollars that the non-profit received. That was done so that it could fully staff those facilities when some of the requested vaccine arrives.
"We actually started with 400 per site," said Elizabeth Alviar, Director of Clinical Operations. "That's our initial request, and then once we get our processes in place and get the routine, you know, going, and get all the kinks worked out, then we will request additional."
The non-profit team said now they are just waiting for word on when they will get a shipment of the vaccine. When that happens, they will start signing people up who are in those high-risk categories.