Power outage prompts health officials to administer 8,400 doses of coronavirus vaccine

HOUSTON – A power outage Monday at a Harris County public health facility left officials in a hurry to administer 8,400 doses of the coronavirus vaccine stored there.

Officials said all thawing doses had to be administered before 5pm or would be unusable. This caused officials to start calling places in the area that were able to quickly administer the doses before they went wrong.

One such site was Rice University, which received about 1,000 doses to administer to campus staff and students.

“We talked to students in line and when they found out, they ran here to line up,” Jacob Rascon of KPRC 2 reported during his live report to the university. “Hundreds and hundreds of people are in line.”

Rascon said there were at least 1,000 people in line when he arrived at the gym where doses were administered on a first-come, first-served basis.

Announcements

In a statement, Methodist officials in Houston said they had received 1,000 doses of the Modern COVID-19 vaccine from the batch of thawed shots. All of those doses had been administered Monday afternoon, officials said.

“We didn’t waste a single drop,” said Robert Schwartz, executive vice president of Houston Methodist Hospital. “It was great for our community to be able to quickly administer these much-needed vaccines in the midst of the storm.”

Ben Taub Hospital officials also said they were in the process of administering the vaccines to staff and patients who meet the requirements to receive it. The public is not vaccinated in the hospital.

LBJ Hospital and Harris County Jail also received doses of the vaccine to administer.