The Biden government and California will establish a massive coronavirus vaccination site at the Oakland Coliseum, officials announced on Wednesday, an effort to deliver thousands of vaccines daily to underserved communities.
The site – one of the first mass vaccination sites in the country created by the federal government – is due to open on February 16. He will be able to deliver about 6,000 doses a day, Governor Gavin Newsom said at a news conference outside the Colosseum.
“Capital is the decision of this moment,” said Newsom. “The reason for choosing this location was the structure to ensure that communities that are often left behind are not left behind, are prioritized in terms of administering these vaccines.”
The site will be open to people who are eligible to be vaccinated under Alameda County rules, but there will be no restrictions based on residency and the goal is to make it a regional resource, according to Brian Ferguson, a spokesman. from the Emergency Services Office.
The stadium, located in a low-income area of East Oakland, is close to Interstate 880 and is connected to the BART and Capitol Corridor train stations. The authorities plan to reserve time periods at the Colosseum for people served by community clinics and other organizations that work with populations that may not be vaccinated elsewhere. This includes low-income people, communities of color and the elderly.
The Colosseum is among the first of 100 new mass vaccination sites that the Biden government plans to establish across the country in the first 100 days. Another website announced on Wednesday was at California State University Los Angeles, located in eastern Los Angeles.
Jeff Zients, President Biden’s COVID-19 response coordinator, said both sites were chosen because they were in communities severely affected by the pandemic.
“These sites in California are just the beginning,” said Zients.
In addition to the permanent sites, the authorities have announced two mobile vaccination clinics linked to sites that may go to the community.
The state previously announced mass vaccination sites at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Petco Park in San Diego and the Cal Expo fairground in Sacramento.
Federal officials will primarily work on the spot, from agencies including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of Defense and Health and Human Services. Newsom said the Governor’s Emergency Services Office will also supply workers to the site – and “we will hire local people,” he said.
The state has released vaccine suppliers to inoculate health workers and other frontline professionals, nursing home residents and people over 65, although many counties are still concentrated in people aged 75 or over because of a shortage of vaccines. Alameda County said that starting next week, it will begin offering vaccines to people at least 65 years of age, as well as emergency service workers, teachers and childcare providers and workers in the food and agriculture industry.
The Coliseum remains home to the Oakland A’s. The team’s scheduled home debut is April 1, although it is unclear whether any fans will be allowed to watch the games in California.
People can apply for the vaccine on the state’s MyTurn scheduling system, although consultations are not yet available locally. Newsom said widespread vaccinations could begin “when we move from the pilot to a full-scale operation”.
The vaccine’s release in the state has been slow since the doses were made available in December, although the pace has recently improved. Newsom said California is now giving more than 1 million vaccinations a week on average, tripling the rate a month ago, and that its biggest limitation is the limited supply of doses from the federal government.
“We recognize what you recognize – there are parts of this state that are running out of vaccines, where they are decreasing in terms of dose distribution,” said the governor. “The federal government has no dose to support states like ours on the scale that we would all like to see.”
California is expected to receive 1,060,000 doses of the vaccine this week, which Newsom called “encouraging”. But he added that “no one is satisfied with the pace of distribution of these vaccines. Of course, we have more work to do. “
Alameda County, he said, performed particularly well in vaccine distribution, administering more than 90% of the vaccines delivered. It is not clear whether that figure includes private health care systems, which receive their own vaccine supply.
The Newsom government said last week that the state will be tasked with managing the distribution of the vaccine to California’s Blue Shield, with the help of Kaiser Permanente, although it has released few details.
Newsom said on Wednesday that more information about the deal would be released on February 15. He dismissed concerns that the deal, which was negotiated without a bidding process, was influenced by the longstanding political support that Blue Shield and Kaiser gave the governor and his favorite causes.
“His ability to do data analysis, his ability to hold suppliers accountable, to do some payment and incentive processing, is unmatched,” he said. “They have the kind of scale, they have the capacity, they have the allocation distribution mentality that we were looking for.”
Aidin Vaziri, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, contributed to this report.
Tal Kopan and Alexei Koseff are editors of the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected], [email protected] Twitter: @talkopan, @akoseff