Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Tuesday that California would make changes to a program designed to address inequalities in the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine after a Times report found evidence that strangers were misusing the program to get appointments. reserved for residents of neighborhoods hardest hit by the pandemic.
“We don’t like to see these abuses,” Newsom told a news conference in Sacramento.
The program to improve access to the vaccine in communities of color depends on special codes that allow people to book appointments on the My Turn vaccine scheduling website. The codes are provided to community organizations for distribution to people in predominantly black and Latino communities.
But these codes have also been circulating, in group messages and texts, among the wealthiest, working at home in Los Angeles, who are not yet eligible for the vaccine under state rules. Many of them were under 65 years old.
Newsom did not provide details on what changes would be made to the program, but said the state would be “moving away” from the group code system.
The governor said the codes were also misused during a mobile vaccination clinic held on Saturday at the Ramona Gardens public housing development in Boyle Heights, where Newsom and other elected leaders were present.
Newsom said it was “very clear in that place of public housing that not everyone was from that community”. Subsequently, the state found that a group code used to make appointments had been shared more widely, allowing those outside the community to successfully book.
“We are working on these things and correcting them,” said Newsom.
Early last week, California opened two new mass vaccination sites with the Biden-Harris administration, with one at Cal State Los Angeles and another at Oakland Coliseum. The sites were intended to help vaccinate individuals in two of the most affected communities, as part of a state-federal partnership for the first time in the country, aimed at a fairer vaccination process. These sites have also been combined with mobile vaccination units designed to deliver vaccines directly to communities or workplaces that might otherwise have difficulty accessing them.
As part of this approach, the state has reserved blocks of commitments in both locations specifically for the most affected individuals. Special access codes were given to local organizations, who were asked to distribute them to members of the community to make their appointments. As The Times found, these codes circulated widely in the wider LA community, allowing some people who would otherwise not be eligible to vaccinate at the Cal State LA site.
Brian Ferguson, a spokesman for the Governor’s Emergency Services Office, said he had no immediate details on what the new vaccine registration system will look like.