There is growing concern that Los Angeles County residents will not be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 until next year, unless approved vaccine supplies get a big boost.
LA and the rest of the country are struggling to get enough vaccine to meet growing demand, especially after California has allowed people aged 65 and over to have access to vaccines. But while many are calling for the vaccine, officials say they are getting only a fraction of what they need.
Dr. Paul Simon, director of science for the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, said that if weekly vaccine shipments increased to 500,000 doses, the county could immunize 75% of its adult population by mid-summer.
At the current rate, however, he said that “the vaccination effort is likely to continue until 2022”.
Mayor Eric Garcetti said that while the pace of vaccinations is likely to accelerate as more doses become available and additional vaccines are approved, the math is challenging in a county of about 10 million people.
Both vaccines approved for public use in the United States – from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna – require two doses administered weeks apart. Therefore, said Garcetti, for “the 7.5 million of the 10 million people that the municipality’s Department of Public Health expects to receive vaccination”, 15 million doses are needed.
The county has received an average of 160,000 doses per week, he said.
Even with the 853,650 doses the county received on Wednesday, there is a staggering gap of almost 14.2 million. At the delivery rate quoted by Garcetti, it would take about 88 weeks for the vaccine to arrive to serve all Angelenos who need it.
Garcetti said he is confident that manufacturers will be able to meet demand and that the possible arrival of additional vaccines under review – including one from Oxford University and AstraZeneca and a single dose offer developed by Johnson & Johnson – will increase supply further.
“We are ready to do more here,” he said. “It will be a sad day when I’m here saying, ‘Dodger Stadium has a capacity for 12,000 people, but we only have vaccines for 2,000.’”
Given the huge need in the country’s most populous county, even administering doses to priority groups can take months, unless the supply situation improves.
“If you do a calculation of what the county is getting each week – about 160,000 – and just look at the number of health professionals and seniors, we will not go through them until June,” said Garcetti.
Health officials across California have expressed frustration with the pace of vaccine deliveries, saying they have a lot of capacity and staff available, but not enough vaccines for everyone.
“We are simply not getting enough doses of vaccine to act as quickly as we do, and you would like to,” said LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer this week.
Another problem is that the amount delivered to health agencies has varied from week to week; officials say this makes planning long-term vaccinations and scheduling appointments difficult, if not impossible.
“We are challenged by the unpredictability of supply each week,” said Simon. “And then we really have to wait and see how much we are going to receive before our providers can start making appointments with their patients.
Officials in San Francisco warned this week that their public health department was at risk of running out of COVID-19 vaccines, after the city’s allocation has dropped substantially since a week ago and the doses that had to be reserved have not been replaced.
Although this situation has been avoided – thanks to California’s authorization to use specific doses of Moderna that had been maintained for additional safety analysis – health officials said that “city suppliers do not have enough vaccine supplies to meet current population that has been designated by the state to be vaccinated. “
Another bottleneck has formed, as several available doses must go to the second doses within the prescribed period of three or four weeks. When scarcity occurs, fewer vaccines are available for the first doses of the vaccine.
This is certainly the case in LA County, where Simon said on Friday that he thinks “most of the supply next week will go to second doses.”
“There will be some first doses offered, but we want to be very careful, because we cannot, unfortunately, predict the supply chain even a few weeks in advance,” he said.
Simon acknowledged that there is tension “between wanting to vaccinate as many people with the first dose [and] trying to ensure that all vaccinees receive the full two-dose sequence. “
He added: “Vaccine testing was done with this two-dose regimen in mind. We know this works. We don’t know exactly what level of protection someone gets if there is a delay in the second dose. “
Another factor is that the criteria for who can be vaccinated – and when – were somewhat fluid.
While the state originally focused its efforts on health professionals and staff and residents of long-term care facilities such as nursing homes, Governor Gavin Newsom announced last week that people aged 65 and over could receive the COVID-19 vaccination – increasing the number of eligible Californians but causing confusion when some counties postponed vaccination for the new eligible group due to limited supplies.
It is difficult to obtain data on how many vaccines have been administered and the numbers are often delayed. According to the California Department of Public Health, providers reported administering nearly 1.6 million doses across the state on Tuesday.
There is cautious optimism that California is finally overcoming the coronavirus outbreak that has plagued the state for months. The number of daily infections and hospitalizations for COVID-19 have decreased markedly, although they remain much higher than before the third wave of the pandemic in early November.
The final indicator of the spread of the coronavirus – the number of deaths – remains high. California broke its record for the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in a single day on Thursday, at 735.
While some pandemic indicators appear to be heading in the right direction, officials warn that progress is precarious.
“Despite these promising trends, I want to emphasize that the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths remains very high,” said Simon. “So while there are reasons to hope, we should all be vigilant.”
Prevention protocols, such as wearing masks in public, washing your hands regularly and avoiding meetings with people outside the home, remain vital as the vaccination effort increases, officials and experts say.
But each new dose, said Garcetti, is “a little more sunshine each day, until finally the clouds clear.”
“Each vaccine that we distribute here and in places throughout our city and across our county is the beginning of the end of this terrible year that we have been experiencing,” he said. “It is the hope for the next few days. It is a cure for a resurrected economy, for a restored Los Angeles, children back to school, loved ones around – each dose is an injection of hope into the future. ”
Times staff writers Maura Dolan, Colleen Shalby, Hayley Smith and Maya Lau contributed to this report.