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- Five new vaccination sites are being built in the US: three in Texas and two in New York.
- It’s part of the Biden administration’s plan to vaccinate “socially vulnerable communities.”
- The sites will be capable of administering more than 10,000 shots a day.
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The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it is building five new vaccinations sites across New York and Texas in effort to immunize poorer and more vulnerable American populations against COVID-19.
The US government will partner with Texas to build three new community vaccination centers in Dallas, Arlington, and Houston, Jeffrey Zients, the response coordinator of President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 response team said in a press briefing.
In Houston, a site will be at NRG Stadium; in South Dallas, a site at Fair Park; and in Arlington, a site at AT&T Stadium. These are communities which have been hit hard by the pandemic, Zients said.
“Together, these sites will be capable of administering more than 10,000 shots in arms a day,” he said.
The sites, which will be operational on February 22, will be staffed by federal teams who will work with the state and local authorities, Zients said.
Later on Wednesday, Zients joined New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, in announcing two community-based mass-vaccination sites located in "socially vulnerable communities" in the state. The sites are based at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and York College in Queens.
The sites will vaccinate around 3,000 New Yorkers each day over the course of eight weeks. This makes them the largest vaccination centers in the state.
"COVID created low tide in America, and all the ugliness, structural racism, injustice and disparity lurking beneath the surface was exposed," Cuomo said in a statement.
"We know that communities of color suffered the most and from day one we've made the fair and equitable distribution of the vaccine a priority," he said, adding that the sites will make a dramatic impact on the communities which have suffered the most.
The announcement of the new sites comes days after the White House said it was sending the military to California help administer COVID-19 shot at vaccination sites, per CNBC.
It's part of Biden's push to curb the spread of the virus. His goal is to administer 100 million doses in his first 100 days in office (by the end of April). This requires an average of one million shots to be given out each day.
So far in the US, about 33.7 million people have received at least one dose of a vaccine, and about 10.5 million people have been fully vaccinated with two shots, according to the CDC.