Dallas County announced Monday it will allocate thousands of COVID-19 vaccine doses for essential workers at Kroger, Albertsons, Tom Thumb and Target.
The program began on Monday, the first day that all adults in Texas became eligible for the vaccine.
Laura Daniels, 53, is an employee at Kroger, where she processes orders for customers and loads groceries in their cars. She had been waiting for her doctor’s office to get a batch of shots.
“This is [much] more convenient,” she said while waiting for her dose at the Kroger on Maple Avenue in Dallas. “I don’t have to go far, stand in line or anything.”
People who work in grocery stories had not previously been eligible for the vaccine unless they belonged to another eligible group, like people 50 and over or those who have a pre-existing medical condition making them more susceptible to a severe case of the virus.
“I know it’s been on my heart and it’s been on a lot of people’s hearts — what about these essential workers in the grocery stores?” said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins at a press conference. “We need to get them inoculated because they have done so much for us during this pandemic.”
Jenkins said that while Walmart, CVS and Walgreens have been able to provide shots to their employees, Target has about 1,000 employees still needing to be vaccinated. Kroger and Tom Thumb/Albertsons each have approximately 3,000 employees that still need a shot, according to the judge.
The county’s program will eventually cover these 7,000 workers with doses, if they want them. The program is limited to 2,340 total shots this week, split between Tom Thumb and Kroger. Target starts the program next week.
As an incentive, a Kroger official said employees there will receive $100 cash from the company for getting vaccinated. Tom Thumb and Albertsons said they are also giving $100 cash to associates once they are vaccinated.
Employees of Target will get four hours of paid time off for each dose, and will be paid for any time off they need if they have a bad reaction to the vaccine, according to Gary Huddleston at the Texas Retailers Association.
Kroger employee Corey Matthews said being able to get vaccinated at work was definitely easier than traveling to the county’s mass vaccination site at Fair Park. Yet he said he’ll wait another couple of months, to see if there are any adverse effects on people.
“I treat it like a new iPhone. You have to wait until they get the fixes and kinks out. Then it’ll be good to go,” Matthews said as he managed a busy self checkout line at lunchtime.
Three vaccines — Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — have received emergency use authorization from the Food & Drug Administration.
Jenkins said the county is now able to do this program because, with the state opening up eligibility to all adults, restrictions on any special county vaccine programs have essentially been lifted.
“We couldn’t, for instance, say ‘all of our doses are going to East Dallas.’ But we can do this,” he said.
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