In reality all 13,300 doses had been administered, but some vaccine providers were having trouble inputting records into the state's system, called ImmTrac2.
"They would input 300 new persons and then go back to their file and those 300 persons weren't there," Laredo Health Director Richard Chamberlain recalled of one of the providers who struggled with ImmTrac last month. "In general, the schools have worked with ImmTrac before. The H-E-Bs and other pharmacies have worked with ImmTrac. But new providers that have never done vaccines, they've never worked with ImmTrac either. So it's a little bit of a learning curve for them."
This was an issue for vaccine providers across the state, and many feared the consequences of the optics: it looked like the vaccines they had been provided and in fact administered were just sitting on a shelf.
But it never affected the number of vaccines sent to Laredo, Chamberlain said, because the Texas Department of Emergency Management was also collecting administration information from each provider, closing the gap in the data.
And providers have now more or less worked out the kinks of the system. The state's data for Laredo is still slightly off, but Chamberlain hopes it will be up to date by Monday.
These issues with ImmTrac have been brought to the forefront due to the pandemic, but the state's immunization registry has been a thorn in the side of state lawmakers for years.
For the last 12 years, Laredo's Sen. Judith Zaffirini and Rep. Donna Howard of Austin have introduced legislation that would by default enroll Texans into ImmTrac's system if they receive a vaccine.
ImmTrac is not public record and is only accessible to medical professionals, but it currently operates so that anyone who receives a vaccine must actively opt in to have their information registered with the state.
These lawmakers are working to flip it around so that Texans would need to opt out if they did not want their vaccine information uploaded, rather than opt in to the system every time.
Dr. Marc Boom, chairman of the Texas Hospital Association, said this change should be a no-brainer. Texas is one of only four states in the country to have an opt-in vaccine registry.
"This one statutory change removes a key barrier unique to our opt-in registry that continues to contribute to the issues with data on vaccines administered, a barrier that we've known has existed for years and has always had the potential to bring us where we are today, where data on the distribution of a life-saving vaccine is faulty," Howard said.
Unlike the meningitis, measles, tuberculosis and other vaccinations, the COVID-19 vaccine registry was switched to be an opt-out system due to the emergency of the pandemic, which should have streamlined the process for providers.
But the technological infrastructure of the system made it so that patients' electronic health records could not be seamlessly imported into ImmTrac.
Many vaccine providers had to report hundreds of records by hand into Excel spreadsheets, introducing human error into the data, Howard said.
Zaffirini noted that the best way to resolve this situation is to make the registry opt-out, permanently. Texans need to be able to trust their immunization registry, she said.
"Most Texans may not know our immunization registry even exists, but I assure you they want it to work," Zaffirini said. "Requiring them to request their information be added every time they or their children receive a vaccine actively undermines that mission and puts the burden of preserving public health on millions of Texans who have other things to do but nevertheless deserve to be protected."
The opposition to this legislation comes from people who believe vaccination information should not be collected by the government at all and groups who believe vaccines should not be mandated, Zaffini noted.
Of the 14,100 people who have been vaccinated by the Laredo Health Department, not a single person has opted out of the vaccine registry, Chamberlain told LMT.
(c)2021 the Laredo Morning Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
