Vaccination Update

Monday, January 4, 2021

Miners,

A quick update on vaccination.

Staff and faculty worked over the holidays to be ready to vaccinate as soon as we get word from the state that vaccine has been allocated for us to administer.

All paperwork was submitted to the state in mid-December and we informed state health authorities last week that we are staffed, equipped and ready to vaccinate as of today. 

We plan to do vaccination in the new Interdisciplinary Research Building (IDRB) and have designed our system to be able to vaccinate 480 people a day, scalable to 960 a day in an 8-hour shift. If there is more vaccine that needs to get to people, we can expand our hours of operation. 

UTEP is one of the few institutions in the city with the expertise, trained people, equipment, communications and IT infrastructure to be able to do large-scale vaccination. We are now ready to do so.

While we have set ourselves up to vaccinate the 27,000 faculty, staff and students who are enrolled or employed at UTEP, we have designed our system so that we can expand it to serve families and citizens generally if state or local authorities need us to do so. This may be particularly important as the supply of vaccines increases in the coming weeks.

We are actively working with the state to have them allocate vaccine to UTEP to administer. 

As of this morning, 8,905 faculty, staff and students have completed all paperwork to be vaccinated and we have the systems in place to immediately contact and schedule people for vaccination who are in the highest priority risk groups as soon as we know when and how much vaccine will arrive. 

• More than 1,050 of those who are registered are in the highest priority group currently eligible for vaccination.

• Another 1,380 are also eligible to be vaccinated now because they are 65 and older or have at least one chronic medical condition that puts them at high risk.

As soon as we get word about vaccine supply, we will communicate with our highest risk people to get you scheduled for a day and hour to be vaccinated at a time that works for you. We are keeping a “stand by” list of people by risk level who would be able to come to get vaccinated within an hour if someone misses their appointment. The only wasted vaccine is vaccine that is not in someone’s arm.

If you are eligible for vaccination and you have the opportunity to be vaccinated through your doctor or another health care provider, you should do so. Don’t wait for us. 

If you haven’t registered to be vaccinated at UTEP, you can register here. There will be no walk-in vaccination at UTEP.  

Again, thanks to all of the Miners who worked over the holiday break. Because of them, we’re ready.

Warm Regards,

Heather Wilson
President