Happy Veterans Day! We at the Harris County Law Library honor all those who served and reaffirm our commitment to connecting veterans with helpful legal and community resources.
Read morePutting the Squeeze on Grapefruit in Texas
February’s unprecedented winter freeze swept across Southeast Texas, affecting everything from agriculture to zoos. Citrus growers in the Rio Grande Valley, where the best Ruby Reds are produced, took an especially hard hit. As a result, this season’s yield of saleable Ruby Reds is lower than expected, and Texas grapefruit are in short supply. Consumers, however, are just as hungry for their favorite fruit. In order to meet their demand, Texas is relying more heavily on imported grapefruit from places like Mexico or South Africa. What does this mean for the grapefruit growers of Texas? Here’s the pulp.
Read moreTexas House Passes Bill to Open Two New Public Law Schools
“Eight hundred miles to El Paso from the state line…”
The El Paso area and the Rio Grande Valley are both underserved legal markets where aspiring lawyers face geographic barriers to earning a relatively affordable JD.
Read moreTexas Legislative Authority for Executive Actions by Governor in Emergencies
Image by JoeSchmoYaKnow from Pixabay
A synopsis of the statutory authority for the Texas governor’s ability to take executive actions during emergencies and a summary of what those actions have entailed related to COVID-19.
Read moreCOVID Vaccine Roll-Out in Harris County, Texas, and the United States
This morning, the first COVID vaccine dose was administered in the United States, on live television, to a critical care nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center named Sandra Lindsay. Around the same time, doses of the vaccine began arriving in Texas by air freight. MD Anderson was the first hospital in Houston to receive a shipment and will start administering the vaccine to its frontline employees on Wednesday.
Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the vaccine will be free for the vast majority of recipients. Almost 20,000 doses are already here in Houston, and 75,000 more will arrive in town tomorrow. Since each vaccine requires two doses, that is enough to vaccinate roughly 47,000 of the more than 4 million people living in Harris County. While that number seems small, it is over 42% of the 224,250 doses arriving in all of Texas this week.
Of course, more doses will be coming, but the roll out will be too slow to allow even more immediate inoculation of all hospital workers who risk exposure on a daily basis. The limited number of doses in Harris County will be prioritized for certain healthcare workers, and residents of the sorts of long-term care facilities that have been ravaged by the virus nationwide.
This tracks with the statewide plan for Texas, which is to prioritize the vaccination of healthcare workers.
On the national level, the FDA has approved the Pfizer vaccine, which is the one currently being distributed and administered, and is the agency is expected to approve the Moderna vaccine by the end of this week. Though there are some differences, both vaccines require two doses to reach full efficacy, and both vaccines work through the use of messenger RNA, which you may remember from high school biology.
It is impossible to contract the coronavirus from either vaccine, though some patients will experience side effects.
Some confusion may stem from the fact that social distancing, mask-wearing, good hand hygiene, and limited contact with others will have to continue until a large enough swath of the nation is vaccinated. Dr. Anthony Fauci anticipates this will take until next fall, though some epidemiologists have estimated it could even take through early 2022. There are a few reasons for this.
One reason is that the vaccine will protect vaccinated people from becoming gravely ill with Covid, but may not entirely stop vaccinated people from becoming sick.
Another reason is that even if an infected person has been vaccinated and does not become ill, they will probably still be contagious.
Additionally, it is still unclear how long immunity from the vaccine will last.
As they say, every journey begins with a single step. Today, the United States took a giant step towards a return to a world where we can once again hug our families and friends.