TEXAS – Texas is home to nearly 30 million people and although progress has been made with regard to COVID-19 vaccine distribution, the state still lags behind.

On Monday people in Phase 1C - those between the ages of 50 and 64 - became qualified to receive an injection, but there are simply not enough doses on hand to begin accommodating them in any meaningful way. Austin Public Health, for instance, is focused on vaccinating those in 1A and 1B until it receives sufficient supply.

With that in mind, Texas’s two senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, sent a letter to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky asking that the agency take the state’s population into account when determining allocation. The letter reads, in part:

“We understand CDC is making distribution decisions based on outdated data from 2018 that fails to account for Texas' recent population growth, including the fact that Texas added about 374,000 new residents in the one year period ending on July 1, 2020.

“As a result, CDC has not provided Texas with vaccine doses sufficient to meet its needs, especially in comparison to other states. For example, as of late February 2021, Texas had the lowest per capita number of doses delivered when compared to the other states.

“This is unacceptable.

“We therefore urge CDC in the strongest possible terms to immediately rectify this problem and to use current population data when making future allocations of the COVID-19 vaccine to the states and territories.”

According to the Texas Department of State Health Services’s COVID-19 vacccine dashboard, as of March 15 5,463,132 Texans have received at least one vaccine dose, 2,871,034 people in the state are fully vaccinated, and 8,176,731 total doses have been administered.