VACCINATION

Long an opponent of vaccine and mask mandates, the Republican said pharmaceutical companies may have misrepresented data. Pfizer strongly disagrees.

For some parents of kids under 5 who want to vaccinate them, the wait has been excruciating, fraught with delays and close calls. Others are hesitant to have their young children vaccinated.

Since vaccines became widely available for Texans 12 and older last May, about 82% of Texas’ COVID-19 deaths were among the unvaccinated.

Launched in June, a cross-border effort using buses and donated vaccines is helping roughly 2,000 Nuevo Laredo residents per day get COVID-19 shots in Laredo — 10% of Texas’ daily total.

COVID-19 numbers are plummeting statewide, but on Texas’ southern border with Mexico, Laredo is still battling its fourth surge.

Corbevax, a low-cost coronavirus vaccine created in Houston, could be a better weapon against COVID-19 by reaching the unvaccinated in poorer countries.

Texas will soon surpass its previous COVID-19 hospitalization record. Doctors and nurses say they can’t keep up this pace for much longer and implore people to get vaccinated.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s mandate that requires federal employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The Department of Justice is appealing the decision.

Challenges to new Texas laws on voting, political districts and abortion are all pending in court, as is the state’s challenge to federal vaccine mandates. But until the courts rule, those laws remain in place — and they provide political fodder for the incumbents who support them.

“The situation in Texas is that it probably won’t reach the peak [for cases] until the second half of January,” a top researcher said.

The state has already challenged the federal government’s vaccine orders for big businesses, health care workers and federal contractors.

In 2021, the Tribune’s data visuals team helped tell the biggest stories affecting Texans. Here’s a roundup of our most impactful work.

The highly contagious omicron variant has led to a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases in Texas. Hospitalizations are beginning to increase in a health care system already troubled by staffing shortages.

So far this month, at least 1.2 million Texans have gotten booster shots — nearly triple the number of people who received their first doses of the vaccine during the same time.

Untreated medical conditions, lack of access to testing and limited paid time off leave uninsured Texans particularly vulnerable to the disease.

Texas’ nursing home staff vaccination rates are lower than half the country’s — but a judge’s decision last week to delay a vaccine mandate helped them avoid laying off a third of their employees.

Early indicators suggest the variant is very contagious, but little is known about the severity of disease it causes.

So much is unknown about the new COVID-19 variant: the severity of the illness it causes, whether it can resist vaccines and natural antibodies and whether it’s more contagious than the delta variant that has burned through Texas and the U.S. for months.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had called the mandate “an unprecedented federal vaccine decree” on health care workers.

A surge in COVID-19 cases from the West is impacting El Paso.

Fifty-seven percent of voters support mask requirements in indoor public spaces based on local conditions, while 58% support mask requirements in public schools.

The new state survey is the first time Texas health officials have been able to statistically measure the vaccine's true impact on the pandemic.

The move comes a week after Texas filed a separate lawsuit over new vaccination rules for federal contractors.

Appointment slots filled up quickly for the first pediatric doses. More kid-friendly shot sites come with therapy dogs, toys and snacks.

The approval marks a long-awaited milestone in the nearly two-year fight against the deadly virus that experts say has likely already infected nearly half the population in that age group.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott have been at war with locals and federal officials over vaccinate mandates. Earlier this month, Abbott expanded an executive order to block the requirement for any entity in Texas, including health care facilities and private businesses.

The federal government will now send a first shipment of more than a million doses destined for children in that age group to providers in nearly half of the state's counties.

The vaccine’s protection goes down with time, so medical experts recommend a supplemental dose after two to six months. Find out here if it’s time to get one.

A Houston vaccine team would like a U.S. distributor but for now focuses its efforts abroad to inoculate those in countries where COVID-19 variants surface more quickly.

A prohibition on vaccine mandates was one of Gov. Greg Abbott’s priorities for the special session, but it did not have enough support in the Legislature.

The halt comes after Gov. Greg Abbott expanded his ban on COVID-19 vaccine mandates — which previously applied to cities, counties and school districts — to private employers.

American Airlines and Southwest Airlines say they will continue requiring employee vaccinations despite Abbott’s new order, which has left federal government contractors, nursing homes and other companies caught between conflicting rules from the Biden administration and the state.

About 40% of Texas nursing home workers are unvaccinated and could face dismissal or quit their jobs under a federal vaccination requirement for the industry.

Health officials say that the state’s high rate of unvaccinated people contributed to a summer surge in hospitalizations, which preceded the spike in deaths.

Escuche al Dr. Ivan Meléndez disipar la desinformación que corre entre la población de habla hispana.

Pregnant women are getting vaccinated at lower rates than the general population. “This variant is much more aggressive, [and] pregnant women are getting sicker much faster,” one doctor says.

More than 11% of those who received their first dose haven’t gotten a second shot, and more than 1 million people are more than 90 days overdue.

While some national companies are requiring employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, mandates have been the exception for businesses in Texas.

Ten years ago, the state led in requiring meningitis vaccines for students under 22 enrolling in college. Now, in the middle of a pandemic, lawmakers are more skeptical of a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

In Texas, the vaccination rate among Black people is low compared with other racial and ethnic groups, but in terms of raw numbers, the biggest group of the unvaccinated is white people.

Sheyla Moraes, an intensive care nurse, says this latest surge of the coronavirus pandemic is particularly draining because it was preventable. Listen in the weekend edition of The Brief podcast.

Senate Bill 968, signed into law in June, allows the TABC and other agencies to revoke businesses' state licenses if they make vaccine proof a requirement of getting service.

There are two main groups within Texas’ unvaccinated population: white conservatives in rural areas, and Hispanic and Black people in big cities.

Texas Republican state leaders held their ground against allowing local schools and governments to require masks. The CDC guidelines are not mandates and have no weight of law.

The latest, most transmissible coronavirus variant is spreading rampantly in countries with low vaccination rates, and health experts are bracing for impact in Texas.

In the June poll, 47% of voters said they were coming and going as they were before the pandemic, while 39% said they were leaving the house but exercising caution.

Their Texas swing is part of a larger effort by senior administration officials who are fanning out across the country this week to encourage vaccinations ahead of the administration’s self-imposed goal of hitting a 70% countrywide vaccination rate by July 4.

Worried about a possible resurgence of COVID-19 infections, doctors Carolyn Salter and her husband, Michael Gorby, have taken it upon themselves to get lagging vaccination rates up in rural East Texas.

The possibility that the vaccine won’t work — or that, as some worry, it could even hurt them — is a devastating blow after a year of sacrifice, isolation and waiting for protection against the virus.

Abbott's signature means that businesses that require so-called vaccine passports can't get state contracts and could lose state licenses or operating permits.

Lawmakers didn’t succeed in curtailing the governor's power during a disaster, but they did pass bills that prohibit so-called vaccine passports and ban the mandatory closure of churches and gun stores.

In a period of sagging vaccination rates — particularly among staunch conservatives — state Sen. Bob Hall used his platform to promulgate debunked anti-vaccine conspiracies and push claims that have largely been eschewed by the medical community.

What goes hand-in-hand with the COVID-19 vaccine? Your COVID card, of course.

SAN ANTONIO – Rep. Henry Cuellar and other Congress members representing the San Antonio area are urging the Biden administration to establish a federal pilot community vaccination center in the region. Cuellar -- along with Reps. Joaquin Castro, Chip Roy, Tony Gonzales, and Lloyd Doggett -- sent a letter to the federal government to request the community vaccination centers, which can administer 6,000 vaccines per day. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) -- in partnership with the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM) and local officials -- would provide the necessary staffing and operational support to expand vaccination efforts in the area. “We applaud the work of the President and the Federal Emergency Management Administration to increase the availability of COVID-19 vaccines to underserved communities,” the Congress members wrote in their letter. “In addition to being the third most populous area in the state, Bexar County is ranked first in the Centers for Disease Control’s Social Vulnerability Index.

San Antonio – City officials say the bottleneck in providing COVID-19 vaccinations to Bexar County residents continues to be the supply of vaccine doses. Bridger said that describes about 60% of Bexar County residents. Not all of those who got slots may even be Bexar County residents, though. It’ll just take a little bit of time.”Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff have asked Gov. Though all the mass vaccination slots are currently filled, a Metro Health spokeswoman said residents should continue to check the city’s vaccination site.