A committee charged with recommending who will be in the “Tier 1-B” group for COVID vaccinations in California, and they met on Wednesday to begin finalizing those recommendations.
The Community Vaccine Advisory Committee is made up of dozens of representatives from organizations across the state, including the California School Boards Association, the California State Parent Teachers Association and the California Professional Firefighters, to name a few. As ABC 7 reports, the list of who will come next in line for Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID vaccines is likely to have teachers and caregivers at the top of it. Also at Level 1-B, according to the committee’s current recommendations, will be police and firefighters, correctional officers, food and agriculture workers, supermarket employees and all individuals aged 75 and over.
They will also be in this group imprisoned in state and municipal facilities, but imprisoned in federal prisons will be at the mercy of the federal distribution system. Reportedly, a California prison that houses prisoners with special medical needs, the California Health Center in Stockton, has already received some doses of vaccine.
Part of the order of priorities will ultimately rest with the county’s health departments and how they handle the process of sending messages and delivering the vaccine. As the LA Times notes, in counties with a large population of agricultural workers, things can look different from, say, San Francisco.
“I feel much more comfortable with the distribution of the vaccine than other elements of the response to the pandemic because it is really a public health responsibility,” said Mariposa County Health Officer, Dr. Eric Sergienko, to the LA Times.
There are 61 public health agencies in the state – one for each of the 58 counties and three city-specific departments in Berkeley, Pasadena and Long Beach. Among them, 2 to 2.5 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine will be distributed by the first week of January, and a total of 12.5 million doses by the end of February.
It is not clear at what point the state expects to have completed the vaccination process for frontline health workers and nursing home residents and workers in the state, some of whom have already started receiving vaccines in the past week and a half.
The next phase of vaccination is likely to include people aged 65 to 74, homeless people and those working in critical manufacturing, commercial industrial facilities and transportation. Uber was planning to have its drivers prioritized as soon as possible, but it is unclear where shared travel drivers will fall for all of this – or whether public transport workers and airlines, for example, will take priority.
“There is less vaccine than people who need it, so we are having to make very difficult decisions,” said Dr. Oliver Brooks, co-chairman of the panel that wrote the vaccine guidelines for the state, speaking to the LA Times.
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