In January, President Joe Biden promised to provide state and local health officials with a three-week window on how many doses of vaccine were on the way.
“So far we had to guess how much vaccine to expect for the next week, and that was what the governors had to do: ‘How much am I going to take next week?’ Biden said. “This is unacceptable. Lives are at stake here.”
As of Wednesday, that promise had yet to be fulfilled in the country’s largest county.
“I have no projection of what we are getting [in the] in the next 2-3 weeks, ”said Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer in a call to reporters on Wednesday. Not only that, Ferrer revealed that “we have delayed getting our numbers for the next week”.
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So while Biden promised last month that state and local authorities would have a three-week window on their vaccine quotas to allow for site planning and appointment scheduling, a senior local official said he did not have a week-long window. .
But California Governor Gavin Newsom seemed quite clear on Wednesday how many doses would be received the following week, putting the state’s total at 1.3 million doses, up slightly from last week. Newsom did not indicate whether it had projections beyond that, but the state determines county distributions from figures provided by the federal government, so the critical point in next week’s numbers appears to be at Newsom’s level.
In addition, the lack of projections may be a federal government action – or not.
The governor today sought “to deeply recognize the need to be more certain in terms of supply going forward. And that is exactly what we are working on with the Biden administration. “
On March 1, Newsom is allowing the next phase of vaccination to begin. In LA County, Ferrer estimated that this would mean 1.8 million additional workers to be vaccinated. To date, the county has administered about 1.5 million first doses and about 400,000 second doses. Given the delta between the two and supply problems, adding an additional 1.8 million people to the eligibility list could sow confusion, as the county will likely continue to prioritize second doses before the first ones are over.
The chaos with vaccine distribution and planning has plagued the launch of vaccines in the United States since its inception. Los Angeles had to close its biggest vaccination site last weekend because, on Wednesday, its doses were exhausted. For two consecutive weeks, the county mainly delivered second doses because the allocation numbers were not only wrong, but significantly lower than promised.
“This week we received just 16,000 new doses,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti last week after the Dodger Stadium mega site was closed. “This is the number of new doses that we distribute every day,” he said. “This is 90,000 below the previous week. This is unacceptable. ”Obviously, the city is not getting the three-week window promised by Biden for the next vaccine distributions. And the rapid increase in vaccination sites is not helping.
“It’s a little bit of Hunger Games out there,” said Garcetti. “We are doing a kind of ‘approach to everything above’. I think part of that is that we went to so many places without the supply corresponding to that, that you saw some of the main places … like ours and the county’s mega sites don’t have that much supply. “
Asked about healthcare professionals who are “holding” the injections to ensure they have a second dose available for each first dose administered, Andy Slavitt, a senior consultant on the Covid de Biden response team, said: “We want to make it clear that we understand why health care providers have done this, but it doesn’t have to happen and it shouldn’t happen. ”That was on February 1st.
Slavitt continued: “We fully understand that this was a direct result of the lack of predictability that many states and providers had regarding how many doses they would receive,” he said. “This is one of the reasons why we announced last week that the federal government will provide a continuous three-week window on vaccines that will be sent.”
But that window was not opened and left Angelenos confused.
A Newsom campaign to increase the number of sites offering vaccines has not helped. Although the governor’s effort ends up leading to a vast vaccination network and standardized appointment scheduling, in the short term he added yet another layer of bureaucracy for residents to navigate.
The municipality has a wide network of vaccination sites. The city manages five more, including the giant Dodger Stadium. In addition, there is the network of more than 100 Rite Aid pharmacies and the state’s mega-site recently announced in Cal State LA. Then there are mobile clinics being sent to less-attended neighborhoods. Altogether, according to county data, there are 391 locations. Each of the entities listed above has its own nomination system. Very few of them offer the first doses.
The municipality has a capacity for 500,000 opening hours this week, according to an official statement, but there are only enough doses to distribute less than half of that; just over 211,000 queries. This means that Angelenos not only needs to track multiple sites and cross-reference to find the nearest vaccination site, but also to determine which of these sites actually has the doses available.
Newsom launched MyTurn.com to serve as a one-stop shop for appointments, but as of Wednesday’s surveys there was no record of many of the sites mentioned above.
He revealed Wednesday that the state expects 3 million doses a week until March 1 and 4 million a week until April 30, which would flood the network cited with the vaccine.
Ferrer looked hopeful.
“I think we will have a difficult month in March,” she said on Wednesday, “but things are going to get better. I think it is safe to say that, save for some unforeseen calamity, we will have much more vaccine in April. “