When the UNT Health Science Center took a lead role in Tarrant
County’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign, the center’s president saw it as a
“swing-for-the-fence moment” that could pay up to $25 million and raise the
center’s public image.
At a county commissioners meeting in January 2021, then-center
president Dr. Michael Williams and then-executive vice president Sylvia
Trent-Adams laid out a plan that Trent-Adams said would involve “every sector
of society.”
It was the early days of a vaccine rollout that aimed to protect
the county’s 2.1 million residents from the deadly virus, and Tarrant County
found itself ill equipped for the scale and complexity of the job. Williams and
Trent-Adams presented the Health Science Center as a crucial partner.
“It’s not rocket science,” Williams said at the commissioners
meeting. “It’s actually pretty simple: Start with the patients in mind.”
When the partnership between the county and the Health Science
Center ended prematurely in July 2021, the formal paperwork said it was an
amicable split. Leaders from both sides declared the partnership a success —
and they continue to do so today.
But are those portrayals accurate?
More than 4,000 pages of presentations, reports and emails —
obtained by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram through seven requests under the state
public documents law — detail a partnership that was riddled with communication
issues and power struggles. Ultimately, the Health Science Center failed to
fully achieve multiple parts of its mission, a Star-Telegram investigation
shows.
Most notably, the center’s efforts resulted in just 23,265
vaccinations — less than 10% of the original vision of about 265,000 shots.
When the partnership ended, the Health Science Center’s efforts
were responsible for only 3% of the vaccinations administered by the county and
its partners. This is despite public marketing campaigns that positioned the
center as “Leading Tarrant County’s COVID-19 response.”
- Read this
subscriber-exclusive story by reporter Emily Brindley
No comments:
Post a Comment