In a short time, the Mountain View Community Center was transformed from a recreational space into a mass vaccination center, with the goal of providing the COVID-19 vaccine to 1,000 people a day.
The vaccination center at Avenida S. Rengstorff, 201 is the latest effort by Santa Clara County to expand access to the vaccine, and the first located in Northern County. Health officials say the site is open on Friday and is the third community vaccination site hurriedly set up by the county in recent weeks.
To date, the Santa Clara County health system has administered approximately 60,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to county residents, making it by far the largest vaccine supplier in the region. Behind them are Stanford Health Care at 32,720 and Kaiser Permanente at 17,648.
The vaccine has been distributed mainly in acute care hospitals and in county-administered clinics, making the city’s community center an outpost for convenient access outside a clinical setting. It took significant work in a short time to reconfigure the space at a vaccination center, said Mountain View Mayor Ellen Kamei, counting on a close partnership between Mountain View and the county.
“Through this collaborative effort, we are making it more convenient for Mountain View residents and others who live and work in the vicinity of North County to be vaccinated against this highly contagious virus,” Kamei told a news conference on Friday.
The center will be subject to the county’s vaccine eligibility criteria, which are still quite strict and exclude most people with private insurance. County officials have repeatedly said that people who receive care through Kaiser or Sutter Health must request a vaccine through their own health care provider and that they are likely to be rejected at county-administered vaccination sites. Stanford patients, on the other hand, are encouraged to obtain vaccines through their own providers, but will not be rejected from county locations, according to county supervisor Joe Simitian.
The county and most health insurers are providing vaccines to frontline health workers and all residents over 75. For Stanford patients, residents aged 65 and over are eligible.
Future vaccine supplies are unpredictable and provided by the state on a weekly basis, making it difficult to plan in advance or accommodate a multitude of new orders for the vaccine, said Dr. Jennifer Tong, associate medical director of the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. The last allocation for Santa Clara County was 20,000 doses, she said, which is much less than anticipated.
In addition, separate allocations are made to private healthcare providers like Kaiser and Sutter to serve their own patients, making it impossible for the county to serve all patients with private insurance.
So who can really take advantage of the new vaccination site in Mountain View? Along with the approximately 300,000 people who are patients in the county’s health care system, all uninsured residents will be eligible, including service workers who cannot afford health insurance and those who choose not to have insurance, according to Simitian.
The county’s original COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan, which was sent to the state last month, did not explicitly ask for a location in Northern County, instead of designating the nine county-run health clinics as “distribution points” . Simitian sharply criticized the text and raised concerns that North County residents may not have a local location to receive the vaccine. None of the county’s health clinics are located in Northern County.
Simitian, who represents several cities in North County and West Valley, said his district has 40,000 low-income residents in Medi-Cal and the largest share of senior citizens in any district in the county, and stressed the importance of a close and convenient location for receive the vaccine. He praised the Mountain View supportive community and its “can do” spirit to meet this public health need.
“We needed a location in Northern County to serve the people in our region,” said Simitian. “It is very gratifying to know that we are working and in a short time we will have 1,000 vaccines in this place only”.
Anyone who wants to schedule an appointment for the COVID-19 vaccine should visit sccfreevax.org, a county-run portal with links to several health care providers.