Following an unstable implementation of the state’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts, Gov. private health care providers.
The decision marks a sharp change from a more decentralized process, which has been criticized for inconsistency across the state and slowness in its efforts to vaccinate Californians. It will also mean the outsourcing of tasks that, until now, have been supervised by state and local government officials.
“We understand that the vaccine supply is limited,” said state government operations secretary Yolanda Richardson on Tuesday. “But we also need to deal with the fact that the supply we have now needs to be managed as quickly as possible, so we are developing an approach that allows us to do just that.”
On Tuesday, officials announced their intention to create a nationwide vaccine distribution network, but declined to identify Blue Shield until Wednesday as the company that will be in charge of the program. A California Department of Public Health spokesman said on Wednesday that the contract is expected to be finalized soon and that the transition in oversight will take several weeks.
Kaiser Permanente, a health maintenance organization that provides services to more than 9 million Californians, will run a separate vaccination program for its members and provide additional assistance to the state, the public health spokesman said.
With Blue Shield as a vaccine administrator throughout the state, nonprofit employees will be tasked with managing the flow of vaccination requests and deliveries using new state employee guidelines that determine the order in which Californians will be eligible to be vaccinated. These guidelines are expected to abandon some of the more detailed categories of job eligibility status, rather than favor an approach yet to be explained based primarily on age. With Blue Shield in charge, state officials said the new system would bring equality to a process for distributing the COVID-19 vaccine that has so far been dictated by where Californians live.
“We want to make sure that nothing slows down the administration of the vaccine, except the rate at which the vaccine reaches the state,” said Richardson on Tuesday.
The new statewide vaccine distribution network overseen by Blue Shield will comprise a wide variety of locations where vaccines will be administered, including pharmacies, community health centers and temporary locations. State officials said the system will focus on fair distribution of vaccine doses and allow for quick adjustments as needed.
How Blue Shield was selected for its powerful new role in California’s vaccine strategy – and the specific terms of its contract with the state – was not immediately clear. The Oakland-based health provider serves about 4 million Californians and has been deeply involved in the Newsom administration’s response efforts to the pandemic since last spring, including intervening to help improve COVID-19 testing efforts in April past, after the disastrous start of the state. The company’s chief executive, Paul Markovich, served as co-chair of the governor’s test task force, and some of the company’s employees also worked on the initiative.
Blue Shield’s connections to Newsom are not limited to politics. The health care company, a prominent actor in California’s political campaigns, spent more than $ 1 million in support of Newsom’s campaign for governor in 2018 and nearly $ 1.3 million in lobbying the state government in the last legislative session.
A Blue Shield spokesman said on Wednesday that the company hopes to help “dramatically expand the vaccination rate so that all Californians can be protected”.
“Blue Shield of California is honored to be invited by the governor to play an important role in helping to save lives and overcome this pandemic,” said spokesman Matthew Yi. “We are finalizing the details with the state about our role and we look forward to working with healthcare professionals to win COVID-19.”
California has been struggling to get enough doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, which has prompted some providers to be cautious about administering the doses at hand. Data reporting problems also hampered the state’s ability to understand the reasons behind some of California’s vaccination challenges.
“At the moment, we don’t have an implementation in California, we have tens or hundreds when considering the counties and all the different providers,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Health Access California. “We are currently operating with a fragmented health system, in which an underfunded public health system fills in the gaps. Having a broader system, having better data where problems can be identified, this is very important ”.
Last week, state officials said it could take until June to supply vaccines to everyone over 65. Los Angeles County estimated it would take until 2022 to offer vaccines to all residents, unless additional supplies were available.
Newsom tried to rehabilitate the state’s difficult start to mass vaccinations, telling Californians to “hold me responsible” for a goal of administering 1 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in 10 days. Setting that goal backfired when, due to data collection problems, the state was unable to say definitively whether Newsom achieved its goal.
In the midst of attempts to vaccinate state residents, Newsom launched the My Turn website to help Californians schedule appointments, notify them when they are eligible to be vaccinated and better control California vaccination data.
On Wednesday, the state said it had administered 2.7 million doses across the state, or 57% of the vaccine stock available, although officials warned that data delays continue to affect that count.
Wednesday’s deal with Blue Shield came two days after Newsom said the state would review how it prioritizes Californians in the next round of COVID-19 vaccinations, focusing on age rather than specific occupations considered to be at higher risk. The change does not change who is at the forefront of the previous classification system – health workers and residents aged 65 and over, followed by teachers, farmers and first respondents.
Advocacy groups and the union representing the sectors of work that will no longer be prioritized have criticized the new state plan, saying that a purely age-based system is not a substitute for risk-based classification.
Bob Schoonover, president of Service Employees International Union California, said the shift to age-based decisions about occupational hazards at the next level runs counter to research showing that workplaces are the main source of spread.
“Millions of Californian workers, most of them people of color, have no choice but to leave their homes and work every day, exposing themselves, their families and their communities to COVID-19 and its devastation,” said Schoonover in a communicated.