TYLER, Texas — Friday morning and continuing into Saturday, East Texans with an appointment visited Harvey Hall to get a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine via the first full-blown drive-thru distribution.
"Since this is the first drive-thru clinic we've had, we took a day a couple of days to kind of get all organized properly, as well as make sure we had enough doses and volunteers," NET Health CEO George Roberts said.
Roberts says the people who are getting the vaccine made appointments before today's distribution.
The vaccines distributed today came in a few days ago, but Roberts says they wanted to take their time to make sure everything runs smoothly. 55-time slots were available every hour starting at 8:30 Friday morning. This continued through 4:30 p.m. and will be run like this on Saturday.
"We've had citizens of the area, sign up on our through our website for appointment time slots, and we're going to be giving roughly 400-500 shots here today, and 400-500 shots tomorrow," Roberts said.
For those who didn't sign up, Roberts says more opportunities to get the vaccine are coming.
"We are receiving more vaccines next week so we will probably at least be here on Tuesday and Wednesday, maybe longer next week," Roberts said.
While appointments are no longer available for this weekend, people can enroll to be put on a waiting list.
Those getting vaccinated this weekend and next week are part of the 1a and 1b groups that represent frontline workers, people over the age of 65, and those that are older than 18 who have chronic medical conditions.