SACRAMENTO – As California enters the final stretch of its 10-day race to inoculate a million more people against COVID-19, the state is well short of its goal – another potential blow to Governor Gavin’s coronavirus vaccine launch Newsom.
To reach the goal of one million vaccines that Newsom was trumpeting, health officials would have to inject another 500,000 vaccines into people’s arms by the end of Friday, quadrupling the pace of the past few days. California had already administered nearly half a million doses in total when the governor set his goal last week and, on Wednesday, the total was 971,829, according to the state Department of Public Health.
Sahar Robertson, a Newsom spokesman, said the data as of Thursday was not yet available because it takes time for vaccine providers to report how many doses they administered. She said the state will have a complete view of its progress towards reaching the benchmark next week.
“In issuing this goal, we have undoubtedly seen an increase in the rate of vaccinations and we hope to continue to partner with local counties and the health system to achieve our goal,” Robertson said in a statement.
Vaccine distribution fell short of expectations across the country, but the California launch was criticized as particularly slow and confusing. The state reports that local health departments and hospital systems used only about a third of the doses they received, one of the country’s worst rates, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Since last week, Newsom has promised several times that the state would vaccinate an additional 1 million people by Friday. He suggested that the goal was to increase the urgency around inoculating Californians.
“The reason we set a goal of 1 million is that we are sending an urgent call across the spectrum,” Newsom told a news conference on Monday. He said California needed “a hands-on approach on deck to accelerate the fair and safe distribution of vaccines.”
But the governor’s tendency to embrace bold targets, such as a sudden increase to 1 million vaccines, can backfire if the state is insufficient.
Rob Stutzman, a Republican political consultant, said that confidence in Newsom’s response to the pandemic has already been undermined by public outrage at a dinner he attended in November at the French Laundry in Yountville and a scandal involving major unemployment fraud. Now he could also develop a reputation for being unable to administer the vaccine, turning his credibility into a political risk.
“He seems to have an inclination to define bars that he cannot clean,” said Stutzman. “People would forgive if there was an impression that the best effort is being made. But if you make a promise and you can’t keep it, you are preparing for failure. “
The 10-day clock started counting Jan. 6, when California administered about 480,000 doses, according to the Department of Public Health. This means that the state intends to have about 1.5 million people vaccinated by the end of this Friday.
But an analysis of state data shows that California has administered an average of just 61,500 doses of vaccine in the past eight days, just over half of what it would have needed from the start to reach Newsom’s goal. That number is slowly improving, with the state reporting that 82,787 people were vaccinated on Wednesday.
Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an infectious disease specialist who was involved with the vaccine launch at Stanford University, said that California and other states are challenged because the investment was directed towards vaccine development, rather than health infrastructure needed to bring it to people.
“You can do all the high-level planning,” she said. “From the beginning, we never had any money from the federal level for this last mile.”
Attention has also recently turned to California’s complex hierarchical system to prioritize who is vaccinated, starting with health professionals and residents of long-term care facilities. The state relaxed these rules this week, opening eligibility for anyone 65 and older, while looking for ways to speed up vaccinations.
Dr. George Rutherford, an infectious disease specialist at UCSF, said state officials were right to pay close attention to ethical questions about who should be vaccinated first, but the plans were hampered by complex distribution logistics.
“This is probably an example of perfect being an enemy of the good,” he said.
Rutherford added that he favors moving to a system of mass vaccination sites, to simplify the process of reaching a large number of patients at the same time: “Let’s just move people around.”
Alexei Koseff is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @akoseff