El Paso city, county to soon use centralized vaccine registration system

EL PASO, Texas -- El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego and Mayor Oscar Leeser made an announcement from City Hall on Friday about a new joint Covid-19 vaccination effort in the region.

They said the city and county are going to go to a single, centralized registration system -- instead of separate systems as has been the case to date.

That change is expected to take place within two weeks, the leaders said. The unified registration system will utilize the web portal currently in use by the city.

Although El Paso already leads Texas cities in vaccinations currently, the two men said a combined registration system would make the process better.

"We won't rest until every citizen in our community is vaccinated," the mayor and judge vowed.

Even though they will move to one registration system, the city and county will each continue to operate their existing vaccination sites.

While combining systems, Judge Samaniego said Monday that officials discovered less people are pre-registered for vaccines than originally thought.

“We're beginning to see that there's opportunities to do a lot of over and above and take away from this core of what we thought was 200,000 is actually much less than that,” he said. “People were registering different places and once they got their shot, they didn't un-register from that.”

You can watch the entire news conference with the mayor and judge in the video player below.