Bay Area county officials expressed great frustration this week at the way the state has allocated precious vaccines, saying they are not getting enough doses and that delivery is unpredictable.
Officials say the chaotic system makes it difficult to plan how many doses can be administered on a given day, and how much staff is needed to do so. Many counties also claim to have the capacity to administer many more doses, simply by obtaining them in the state.
While local hospitals struggle with a record increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths, California has lagged behind in almost every other state in its rate of vaccination. Lawmakers and medical professionals are asking the California Department of Public Health to provide more transparency in its distribution plan – or, at least, a little more predictability of how many doses the counties will receive each week.
“It is difficult to plan,” said a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Department of Public Health. “It’s like you’re having a wedding for 200 people and the supplier says you can get food for 25 or 500 people. It is very challenging. “
The amount of vaccine that counties receive each week also varies widely. San Francisco received 3,900 doses in the first week of January and 11,825 in the following week. Next week, the county was told it will receive 4,275 doses – a big drop for no reason.
While most doses of California are being given to major health care providers, such as Kaiser and Sutter Health, county health departments are also responsible for vaccinating tens of thousands of frontline workers and those without insurance .
Darrel Ng, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health, said counties will begin to see greater quantities of the vaccine and more predictable delivery as manufacturing increases. California’s supply is controlled by the federal government.
Still, county officials say the lack of predictability has put them at a great disadvantage.
“You don’t know how many volunteers you need, how many chairs to put in or if it’s worth it (setting up a location) if you don’t know when the vaccine will arrive and how many you will get,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at UCSF. “Your hands are tied.”
San Francisco has received 33,975 doses so far, and 12,330 injections have been given to people as of Thursday. According to the municipality, the health department anticipates that all available doses will be used next week and is requesting another “large volume order” from the state.
However, the county said it was still hampered by “inconsistent distribution” and “operational challenges”. This includes: Some doses being allocated to facilities that are still expanding their operations and uncertainty about which brand of vaccine they will receive – Pfizer or Moderna. The brand is important because people need two doses of the same vaccine, several weeks apart.
Much of the available supply is also being reserved for second doses.
In Santa Clara County, the county executive, Dr. Jeff Smith, said the Department of Public Health ordered 100,000 doses on Sunday, but was told on Tuesday that he would receive only 6,000. Meanwhile, Marin experienced the opposite problem this week: 6,000 more doses than the authorities expected.
Matt Willis, the county public health officer, said the extra doses were “just the problem we wanted,” but it was a challenge to suddenly increase the distribution plan.
The Marin County Board of Supervisors sent a letter to Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday, saying that the county has “infrastructure ready and available for a much more robust public health COVID-19 vaccine program.” But the problem is limited supply to the county.
Dennis Rodoni, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, noted that almost 30% of Marin’s population is over 60 years old. He urged the governor to prioritize counties with high-risk populations, as well as “the readiness to deliver vaccines in a much larger volume. “
Each state in the country is dealing with a limited national vaccine supply and constantly changing the regulations of the Trump administration. But California has been particularly slow in getting vaccines into people’s arms: of the approximately 3.5 million doses the state has received, 975,293 have been administered until Thursday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This amounts to about 28% of the shots used – placing California well behind most states.
Nearly 50 state lawmakers sent a letter to Newsom on Wednesday, demanding a “reliable forecast” and weekly updates on how much vaccine each county will receive in the following month.
“We are all aware of the limited number of vaccines that have been made available to states,” said the letter. “But we believe that we need to plan a more effective and efficient distribution of these vaccines so that we can further improve the public health of Californians and begin to rebuild our state.”
The state health department is working to accelerate the distribution of the vaccine. In the meantime, the agency told The Chronicle on Wednesday that it does not plan to change the current process of sending vaccines to localities and hospitals.
The state is expected to launch a website and a call center next week to give people a better idea of when they are eligible for the vaccine. Newsom also loosened state guidelines on Wednesday to allow those over 65 to receive the vaccine. But these measures will not respond to criticism from county officials.
Some counties are unsure how and when the newly eligible population will be able to obtain their vaccines. The San Mateo County Health Department said on Thursday that it did not have enough doses of the vaccine to move on to the next phase and vaccinate people over 65 and will instead continue to focus on vaccinating health professionals. Cheers.
The state distributes doses to each municipality based on federal government guidelines. Most of California’s supply went to regional health systems, like Kaiser and Sutter.
This system also frustrated local politicians, who say they were left in the dark about how many vaccines are available to their residents through private providers. Lawmakers in Santa Clara and San Francisco have asked major health systems to regularly disclose how many doses they have received from the state.
Meanwhile, as California strives to increase the distribution of the vaccine, more than 450 Californians die every day from COVID-19.
“This is terrible,” said Gandhi, the infectious disease specialist at UCSF. “The irony is that you can only do this with vaccines.”
Trisha Thadani is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @TrishaThadani