In January 2021, Texas started taking COVID-19 vaccines to people instead of waiting for people to come to a clinic.
The Texas National Guard sent small mobile teams into rural counties that had no easy access to a vaccine site. A month later the state launched Save Our Seniors, an effort to reach homebound older Texans in their homes, with roughly 1,100 Guard members supporting it.
I led 450 service members on Joint Task Force COVAX, the statewide vaccination operation, across 79 counties, from January 2021 to August 2022. The operation reached more than 4 million Texans.
It was ordinary program management, under pressure
What stuck with me wasn’t the scale. It was how much of the job was ordinary program management:
- Every team needed a schedule that matched vaccine supply, which changed weekly.
- Every county had a different local partner, and someone had to own each relationship by name.
- Every dose had to be accounted for, because the records mattered as much as the shots.
Where it broke
When things went wrong, it was rarely the plan. It was a handoff nobody owned or a report that didn’t match the count. Fixing those is unglamorous work, and it’s most of the job.
That lesson is the standard every Blue DVSN venture runs on. Name an owner for every handoff. Make the report match the count. Finish the job.
Military service is described in a personal capacity. It does not imply endorsement by the Texas Military Department, the Air National Guard or the Department of Defense.