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The University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth, pictured here, pledged to expand Tarrant County’s COVID vaccination capacity. The center administered less than 10% of the number of vaccines it had envisioned administering through it subcontractor.
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.”
Had the contract reached its cap of $25 million and its vision of about a quarter of a million shots, the county would have effectively paid about $94 per shot. The Health Science Center instead spent about $7.2 million of the county’s federal COVID funds, and the actual vaccinations delivered effectively cost more than $300 per shot.
Likewise, the campaign failed in its aim to significantly reach some targeted populations, namely Black residents and homebound people, according to data outlined in the Health Science Center’s final report. A series of listening sessions designed to guide those efforts drew just 36 people, according to another report.
The Health Science Center passed most of the work related to its contract to OptumServe, a Minnesota-based healthcare company hired by numerous federal government agencies. With OptumServe as the primary subcontractor, the center essentially became a middle man in the county’s vaccination effort.
In recent communications with the Star-Telegram, officials representing OptumServe and the Health Science Center — including Williams, who was appointed chancellor overseeing the entire UNT system, including the main Denton campus, in late 2021 — framed the partnership as successful. County officials, including county judge Glen Whitley and county administrator G.K. Maenius, acknowledged that the center’s work didn’t pan out as expected, but still said it was a positive experience.
“Looking back, we believe that the agreement and the partnership was a very big success,” Maenius said. “It might’ve been that the county or UNT or some of the other players didn’t do exactly what they had intended to do as far as the numbers, but overall we did really well.”
Roxanne Martinez, a community advocate and Fort Worth school board member, disagrees.
Throughout the pandemic, Martinez helped organize assistance for her Diamond Hill neighborhood, which is predominantly Hispanic. She said the county and Health Science Center’s efforts made little difference in the needs she saw in vulnerable neighborhoods.
“I definitely feel that the efforts came late and … just lacked a real focus and intention on how to go about reaching those communities,” Martinez said.
“For me, it was personal,” she said. “Like, my community is dying. What are we doing about it?”
Public service and public image
Tarrant County called on the Health Science Center to step into the vaccination rollout in January 2021.
Although vaccines were then only trickling into the county, officials knew a major influx was on the horizon — and when that supply ramped up, local officials needed to be ready for the tsunami of people scrambling for shots.
“No one entity can do all of the work that’s needed,” said Vinny Taneja, the county’s public health director, in an interview with the Star-Telegram. “It was very clear that it’s going to be a community effort, it’s not just a single entity that can do it all. I mean, this was unprecedented.”
The Health Science Center — which includes a medical school as well as academic programs in public health and pharmacy, and also conducts medical research — seemed like a natural fit for the task.
But the vaccine partnership between the county and the Health Science Center was tenuous from the start. In fact, a large-scale partnership almost didn’t happen.
The county and the Health Science Center worked toward an agreement in January 2021, emails show. But Maenius, the county administrator, told county commissioners on Feb. 1, 2021, that the agreement had fallen through. (Documents reviewed by the Star-Telegram don’t indicate why those negotiations stalled.)
The commissioners then pushed county staff to find a large-scale vaccination partner, and negotiations with the center were reopened.
With the second round of talks underway, Health Science Center officials saw the potential work as a chance to serve the public and raise the center’s public image.
“I think it’s a huge opportunity, but it’s definitely a swing-for-the-fence moment, and we think it’s worth going for, and plus it’s also the right thing to do for the community,” Williams, then the Health Science Center’s president, said at a Feb. 4, 2021, meeting of the UNT board of regents.
At that meeting, which was held a few days before the contract was finalized, Williams voiced concern about public perception of the project and the Health Science Center’s image. He asked the regents to uplift the center’s vaccine work whenever they could.
“You guys are always very highly valued ambassadors for our brand,” Williams said to the regents. “So if in your spaces people are talking about us and this whole project, anything you can do to enhance or explain what we’re trying to do, so the success is not knocked down or diminished because of some erroneous information in the media, would be really helpful.”
(Williams, through his staff, initially agreed to an interview for this story, but then canceled. In later emails, Williams’ chief of staff, Laken Rapier, expressed displeasure with the Star-Telegram’s reporting and wrote that UNT staff “see very little value in providing you with any additional interviews.”)
The vaccination contract
The day after Williams requested the regents’ support, emails among the center’s staff foreshadowed conflict.
The Health Science Center’s special assistant to the president — David Mansdoerfer, who was previously a deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the Trump administration — was a central figure in the contract negotiations and eventual execution.
In a Feb. 5, 2021, email to other Health Science Center officials, Mansdoerfer wrote that he wanted to streamline the oversight process described in the contract.
“My language around reporting and site oversight is pretty stern, but I believe it has to be in order for us to not end up with 20 different folks telling us what we have to do,” Mansdoerfer wrote.
Williams’ then-chief of staff, Susan Ross, replied in the same email thread that the center’s president wanted to, “Soften the language around reporting to the County Administrator. Completely excluding judge [Whitley] isn’t good for the relationship.”
Mansdoerfer replied several minutes later and again voiced his concern about reporting to multiple people. “I, for one, don’t want to be in the place of taking conflicting direction, that is out of scope, from two people. It will only end up poorly for us,” he wrote.
In the end, the final contract listed Maenius, the county administrator, as the county’s point person and specified that the center would update the county commissioners “upon request.”
The contract, which the commissioners approved on Feb. 9, 2021, called for the county to pay the Health Science Center $2.5 million upfront, and up to $25 million over the length of the contract.
The Health Science Center subcontracted the bulk of the vaccination work to OptumServe, which charged the center about $5.7 million for its services over the life of the contract. The company is under the umbrella of UnitedHealth Group and is a federal contractor that works with the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, among others.
The county’s contract with the Health Science Center did not state specific vaccination requirements or goal numbers, but included vague instructions to “work as a strategic partner with the County to increase vaccination capacity above and beyond the County infrastructure” and “provide targeted outreach programs to educate, register and vaccinate those populations in the County that are underserved.”
But the center’s subcontract with OptumServe did include specifics, in the form of an “example timeline” that would result in 264,600 vaccinations over the course of seven months.
The story continues following this graphic.
County-HSC conflict
The Health Science Center opened its first vaccine site on March 23, 2021, six weeks after county judge Whitley signed the vaccination contract with the center.
In anticipation of the site opening, the Health Science Center sent out an announcement to the news media — but center officials apparently didn’t clear the announcement with county staff before sending it out publicly.
In an email to county staff, Mansdoerfer wrote that the center had heard from three county employees — county administrator Maenius, assistant county administrator Lisa McMillan and county spokesperson Bill Hanna — about the announcement.
Mansdoerfer responded to McMillan, and copied the other two county staffers as well as two center employees, and said he was “a bit perturbed by the ‘shotgun annoyance’ approach being demonstrated by the County.”
“From the beginning, I have been very firm that if this relationship is to work, we will not be treated as simple contractors that work at the behest of the many different directional point of views the County offers at any given point of time,” he wrote.
Mansdoerfer made clear in his email that he considered the Health Science Center to be a step above generic county vendors. As opposed to “simple contractors,” Mansdoerfer instead classified the Health Science Center staff as “collaborative partners” to the county.
About a week and a half after the news release dust-up, center staff expressed annoyance over a message distributed by the county. The county sent out a mass message notifying residents that they might hear from the Health Science Center or OptumServe regarding vaccinations. That led to a response from Rapier, who is now Williams’ chief of staff but was then the center’s spokesperson.
“Needless to say, I was completely surprised as none of this was mentioned to me or HSC — let alone approved,” Rapier wrote to two county communications staffers.
Several more county staff were then looped into that email thread, including Taneja, the county’s public health director, who replied internally that the mass message was “standard.”
“If [Rapier] missed the discussion, it was probably because I don’t remember her being on most of the calls except for the last 2-3 calls,” Taneja wrote.
‘Non-existent’ communication
The tension extended beyond public announcements. As the contract progressed, the Health Science Center juggled additional vaccination sites — but didn’t always keep the county apprised of the site openings and closings, emails show.
In mid-May 2021, the center shut down a vaccine clinic in Saginaw without notifying the county, which maintained a website where residents could find vaccination sites. Three days after the site had closed, assistant county administrator McMillan wrote in an email to other county staffers that people had been waiting outside the empty clinic.
“It appears that people are showing up at the location and there is no signage there to let them know it is closed,” McMillan wrote.
In early June 2021, the center opened a vaccination site at Asia Times Square in Grand Prairie. County staff saw the new site when it appeared on the center’s list of sites, a day after it opened, according to an email that McMillan sent to Mansdoerfer.
“We had not realized that the Asia Times Square location had already opened,” McMillan wrote.
McMillan also reached out to county commissioner Devan Allen and asked if she’d been told about the new site opening in her precinct. Allen replied that she had not been told.
“UNTHSC’s communication of late has been non-existent and frankly unacceptable,” Allen wrote in an email to McMillan, with other county staff copied. “At present I am not as confident with their efforts as I would like to be.”
McMillan replied to just Allen and said, “I believe we are all frustrated by the lack of communication and will continue to work with UNTHSC to correct this.”
In the same early June 2021 email thread with McMillan, Allen raised another concern: the Health Science Center had told the county that it had solidified a contract to host a vaccine clinic at Saint Matthew Catholic Church in Arlington.
But Allen wrote to McMillan that she’d spoken to a Saint Matthew representative, who “said they are still waiting to get a contract from UNT and are also awaiting more information to help get folks signed up for the clinic. Yet, UNT is telling us it’s a confirmed clinic.”
“What kind of process is this? This further illustrates my concerns,” Allen said.
(Allen, through her staff, initially agreed to a phone interview for this story and then canceled the interview. The Star-Telegram sent numerous follow-up requests, but Allen’s staff did not reschedule the interview.)
When the Star-Telegram asked Mansdoerfer about Allen’s concerns, he pointed to county administrator Maenius’ role as the county’s point person for the contracted work.
“I can’t control what was communicated on the county side of the equation,” Mansdoerfer told the Star-Telegram, adding that the center gave regular updates in the county commissioners meetings. “At the end of the day the contract stipulated that we went through G.K. Maenius for conversations.”
Whitley, Tarrant County’s top elected official and also previously a member of UNT’s board of regents, similarly said the commissioners get “frustrated at times because a vendor doesn’t do exactly what we ask or exactly when we ask.”
“We tried to do what’s best overall, but sometimes someone has to set the priority and G.K. was the one responsible,” Whitley said. “If we were going to yell at somebody, instead of yelling at the vendor, we need to yell at G.K., and we did that often.”
Vaccinating homebound residents
The Health Science Center was charged not only with delivering vaccinations, but specifically with getting shots to the county’s most vulnerable residents — which included people who are homebound and people who face barriers to health care, as often seen in communities of color.
However, internal documents and data show the center failed to significantly reach some of the county’s most at-risk populations.
In an attempt to vaccinate homebound people, the center contracted with MedStar Mobile Healthcare. The contract said homebound people “are some of the most at risk for mortality if infected due to the existence of underlying health conditions.”
The contract outlined a plan to administer between 800 and 2,400 in-home vaccinations, depending on how many staff members were assigned to the eight-week project.
While that contract was signed at the end of April 2021, internal emails show the Health Science Center notified the county that the program was “Going live this week” in early June 2021.
Matt Zavadsky, MedStar’s chief transformation officer, said the ambulance service was responsible for the actual vaccination process, but relied upon a list of potential clients supplied by the Health Science Center. And, documents show, the Health Science Center received just 43 referrals for in-home vaccinations.
Health Science Center documents reviewed by the Star-Telegram don’t make clear how many referrals resulted in vaccinations, but Zavadsky said the ambulance service provided in-home vaccinations for 23 or 24 people under the contract. Even if all of those patients received a two-dose vaccine regimen, that comes out to just 6% of the contract’s lower range of expected vaccinations of homebound people.
While the contract set out a price range of $34,000 to $68,000, Zavadsky said MedStar actually charged the center $1,657.50 for the in-home vaccination work.
Stephanie Duke, an attorney at Disability Rights Texas, said there’s limited available data on how many people in any particular region are homebound, making it difficult to assess how many Tarrant County residents might have needed in-home vaccinations.
But, without the benefit of concrete numbers, does the MedStar-Health Science Center partnership seem like it made a dent in the area’s need?
“There are over 3 million individuals in Texas with disability. So, 43 [referrals] in a major metro area? I mean, you tell me,” Duke said.
Maenius, the county administrator, said he doesn’t necessarily measure the success of COVID-related programs by comparing initial expectations to the actual numbers. That’s because, when these contracts were written, there were a host of unknowns, he said.
“We had never dealt with something like this before, and we tried to outline to the best of our ability what the responsibilities were,” Maenius said. “But we mainly focus on the end result. And that end result is: Did we make sure that those that wanted to be vaccinated got vaccinated?”
Zavadksy said he believes the program was impactful for the people it reached, but he also said the low number of referrals indicates there’s work to be done in understanding the needs of homebound people.
“I think it made a huge difference for the people who truly met that need,” Zavadsky said. “If it prevented one death, it was certainly worth it.”
Outreach to vulnerable communities
Each stage of the pandemic illuminated health disparities that have made people of color more likely to contract and die of COVID and less likely to access life-saving vaccines. For this reason, the Health Science Center set out to break down vaccination barriers that particularly affect people of color living in Tarrant County.
One of the center and OptumServe’s initiatives was an effort to better understand those barriers in the first place.
OptumServe held five “community listening sessions” from March to June 2021, according to internal reports, which solicited public feedback on vaccination concerns and barriers. Those five sessions had a total of 36 participants, the reports say, and two additional sessions were canceled “due to lack of registrants.”
The sessions did lead to a list of conclusions that, according to the reports, the Health Science Center used in its vaccination work. However, Martinez, the community advocate and now-school board member, said the key conclusions were obvious and readily apparent to anyone who was active in the community.
The listening session reports highlighted that residents struggled with the vaccine registration process, felt confused about how or where to get vaccinated, lacked transportation and faced language barriers, among other concerns.
“Serving and living in this community … those are things I already know,” Martinez told the Star-Telegram. “I could’ve told them that from the very beginning that those were going to be issues.”
Before OptumServe held its first listening session, Martinez and two of her neighbors had already begun working to break down some of the barriers by organizing drive-thru vaccine registrations.
“The whole reason that we did drive-up vaccine registrations was because we knew our community didn’t have access to technology, or even those with internet sometimes don’t know how to utilize it,” she said.
County commissioners Allen and Roy Brooks also raised concerns that the listening sessions ended too far into the contract term to be useful for the center’s work. The fifth and final session — which included the two commissioners and had the highest attendance of any of the sessions, with 13 participants — was held on June 10, 2021.
Three weeks later, the Health Science Center notified the county that it was ending the vaccine partnership. When the county accepted that notice at a July 6, 2021, commissioners meeting, Allen and Brooks said they hadn’t yet seen the results of their listening session.
“I trust before that meeting they had already decided that they were done,” Allen said at the commissioners meeting.
And Brooks said he wasn’t sure that the Health Science Center would even have time to compile its listening session results before it stepped away from the county’s vaccination efforts.
“OptumServe just completed their community focus groups and all of that — just completed that, probably have not even had enough time to crunch the numbers and determine what the trends are. And they’re out of here,” Brooks said at the commissioners meeting. “I’m disappointed.”
‘Too little, too late’ for some neighborhoods
The center’s vaccinations also did not significantly reach some communities of color.
Of the county’s more than 2 million residents, 18.5% — or nearly 400,000 people — are Black, according to 2021 census estimates. About 30% of county residents — or more than 640,000 people — are Hispanic or Latino.
The percentage of Hispanic residents vaccinated by the Health Science Center roughly reflects the county’s Hispanic population — 33% of the center’s vaccinations, or about 7,600 shots, went to Hispanic people, according to the center’s final report. But the center did not proportionally reach Black residents. Of the 23,265 vaccinations, less than 11% — just shy of 2,500 shots — went to Black residents, according to the center’s final report.
Martinez said the 7,600 shots that went to Hispanic residents would be enough to cover only one neighborhood like her own. Compared to the total population of the county, the center’s work didn’t make a significant impact, she said.
“It was too little, too late for our community,” Martinez said.
Community advocate Jonathan Guadian said the center’s vaccination numbers, particularly in communities of color, were “abysmal.” He added that the Health Science Center faced significant roadblocks, including hesitancy and mistrust from the community.
Guadian — who is also an organizer with a group that advocates to remove federal immigration authorities from Tarrant County and who has been critical of the county government’s impact on marginalized communities — said he believes the county’s policies and practices have sown mistrust in communities of color. And because years of mistrust can’t be undone in a few months, he said, the center may have been set up for failure from the beginning.
“The impact they had was very minimal,” Guadian said. “The work that they did … it didn’t have the impact that it needed, but they were also facing so many other hurdles.”
Guadian understands the county didn’t have the staffing levels to tackle the vaccine rollout on its own, but said he would have preferred the county prioritize the work of vaccinating the most vulnerable.
That responsibility “shouldn’t have even been tasked to UNT HSC,” Guadian said. In his view, it should have instead been the county’s in-house responsibility.
“Tarrant County, we always get the impression that they are constantly shelving our communities — Black and brown communities — to the back burner,” Guadian said. “And it definitely showed a lot within the initial vaccination efforts.”
‘It was just ignorant’
Mansdoerfer led a small group of Health Science Center employees who worked on the vaccination efforts without significant input from the center’s public health school, according to Sara Correa, who worked in the center’s advancement and communications office — which works closely with the president’s office.
Correa left the Health Science Center in August 2021, a couple months after filing an internal complaint about the culture and work environment at the center.
Correa worked on the same floor as the president’s staff and sat in some of the meetings where Mansdoerfer and other center officials provided updates on the vaccination work. She said she was left with the distinct impression that the vaccine rollout was coordinated almost entirely on that floor, between the president’s office and the advancement and communications staff.
This is supported by emails between the center and county staff.
The Star-Telegram filed a public records request with the county for all communications between the center and the county regarding the vaccination work, including all emails that involved the county’s public health department, the county commissioners and/or county administrator Maenius. The emails that the county provided to the Star-Telegram, in response to that records request, show that the center’s communications to the county came primarily from staff in the center’s communications office or the president’s office, not from the public health school.
The Star-Telegram also filed public records requests with the Health Science Center seeking all documentation of the vaccination agreement and for all progress reports or status updates given by the center to the county. The documentation that the center provided to the Star-Telegram, in response to those requests, included only a handful of internal email threads about the vaccination work.
“The public health school was not really involved” in the vaccination work, Correa said. “It just didn’t appear they were consulted.”
Another person who worked at the Health Science Center during the vaccination contract term, who asked not to be named in this article due to fear of retaliation, also said that the vaccination work appeared to have been led by a small group of people from the president’s staff and communications staff — primarily Mansdoerfer and Rapier. That person also said it did not appear that the public health school was involved in the decision-making.
Correa said she felt many of the problems in the vaccination work stemmed from the small group of staffers’ lack of public health experience and lack of familiarity with the county’s vulnerable communities. She noted, for instance, that a number of vaccination sites were initially open only during business hours, which resulted — predictably — in low turnout.
“Malicious? No, I don’t think it was,” she said of the center’s approach to vaccinations. “It was just ignorant.”
The end of the contract
On July 1, 2021, Mansdoerfer, the Health Science Center’s special assistant to the president, emailed Maenius, the county administrator, to say the Health Science Center would end the vaccination contract on July 31, 2021 — five months into the seven-month contract term.
The notice, which was later made public on a county commissioners meeting agenda, underscored the center’s successes. But four of the seven accomplishments listed on the notice actually fell under other contracts the center had signed with the county, focusing on the center’s testing and contact tracing work instead of its vaccination work. The notice didn’t mention the number of vaccinations the center administered.
The termination referenced “conversations” that Health Science Center staff had with county staff, and indicated there was no longer a need for the center to be involved in the county’s vaccination efforts.
And while the official termination notice celebrated the Health Science Center and said the center had “answered Tarrant County’s call whenever it had a need,” commissioners Allen and Brooks advanced distinctly more negative views of the partnership as it came to a close.
Brooks in particular had strong words for the center and said at the July 6, 2021, commissioners meeting that he was “tremendously disappointed” in the lack of work accomplished by the Health Science Center and OptumServe.
“I had very high hopes that they were going to increase our ability to serve the underserved populations in the county,” Brooks said at the time. “It appears that they have adopted the advice … [given] to President Johnson regarding the Vietnam War: Just declare victory and get out.”
At that meeting, Whitley, the county judge, asked Brooks if there were specific things he thought should still be done.
“We hired UNT Health Science Center and they hired OptumServe because they were the supposed experts on how to reach underserved communities,” Brooks said. “They were supposed to come to us and tell us how to move the needle in these communities, and it just has not happened.”
A year later: ‘extremely proud’
In recent interviews with the Star-Telegram, county staff and Health Science Center staff presented a unified, positive front.
Leaders from both sides of the contract — including Maenius and Whitley from the county, and Mansdoerfer and Trent-Adams from the center — advanced the same explanation: that the vaccine rollout was a time of constant change, that the challenges of reaching the underserved were greater than originally anticipated and that the center did the best it could in a difficult situation.
Officials pointed, mostly, to a lack of sustained demand for the COVID vaccines, and a nationwide dip in people signing up for the shots.
“The numbers were somewhat disappointing,” Maenius told the Star-Telegram. “But quite frankly, we in public health … at one time, we were just stacked on people wanting to come through our drive-thrus and our walk-ups. And it dropped very significantly there, also.”
Whitley’s June 2022 calendar indicates that county officials jointly met before their interviews for this story. On June 10 — several days after the Star-Telegram requested interviews for this story and several days before Maenius, Whitley and Taneja each spoke to the Star-Telegram — Whitley’s calendar shows a half-hour meeting titled “Health Science Center – Media Interview discussion” with a note that a “Reporter [is] requesting an interview about vaccines.”
The Star-Telegram requested more information on that meeting, and the county noted that the meeting was attended by Whitley and two of his staff, commissioner Brooks, county administrator Maenius, public health director Taneja and county spokesperson Hanna.
During the Star-Telegram’s reporting, the Health Science Center told center staff not to speak with the media, according to an internal email that was obtained by the Star-Telegram. The email, which was sent one day after the Star-Telegram sent a private message to a center employee and asked to speak about the vaccination contract, instructed staff not to reply to any press inquiries and to instead notify the center’s communications staff.
Brooks, who was publicly harsh about the work accomplished at the time, shifted his tone in a recent interview, which was attended by Hanna. In that interview, Brooks said his previous comments “about the need to go in a different direction were not an indictment of UNT Health Science Center as an institution.”
He said he believes the center did its best and that the vaccination contract’s initial mission statements were “aspirational.”
“If you don’t put an aspirational goal out there, you won’t have aspirational results. But at the same time, the failure to reach an aspirational goal does not nullify the trying. It’s the trying that is important, and if you fall short, then you fall short,” he said.
And although Williams — through chief of staff Rapier — declined to speak with the Star-Telegram, Rapier sent a statement on his behalf. In that statement, Williams said he is “extremely proud of how HSC responded during the COVID-19 pandemic,” including its efforts to vaccinate vulnerable populations.
Mansdoerfer told the Star-Telegram in an interview that, when the contracts were written, the work was still “all theoretical.” And while the demand for vaccines dropped off, Mansdoerfer said he believes the Health Science Center still did increase health literacy in the community.
“But at the end of the day, you can’t fight market forces the way that they appeared nationwide,” he said.
Optum, the umbrella organization over OptumServe, through spokesperson Aaron Albright, also pointed to “supply chain issues, and rapid supply and demand challenges.”
“Despite these challenges, both HSC and Optum were able to successfully serve thousands of community members in Tarrant County,” Albright said in an email statement. He declined to respond to residents’ concerns that the center and OptumServe failed to significantly reach communities of color.
Mansdoerfer said both the county and the Health Science Center have learned how to better operate after their experience with the vaccine rollout. And for the Health Science Center, he said, it was also an opportunity to increase the center’s visibility.
“At the end of the day, COVID in many ways has been — while I would never wish [to] have to go through it again — has been a real opportunity to show what an asset HSC is to the community,” Mansdoerfer said. “And so, to me, that’s the true value of what I think we gained here at the Health Science Center.”
And what about those terse emails between the Health Science Center and the county and those complaints of poor communication?
“Welcome to county government,” Whitley said.
This story was originally published September 22, 2022 5:30 AM.
Emily Brindley is an investigative reporter at the Star-Telegram. Before moving to Fort Worth, she covered the coronavirus pandemic at the Hartford Courant in Connecticut. She also enjoys backpacking, rollerblading and watching reality TV. Send tips and hot takes to ebrindley@star-telegram.com.