Los Angeles County residents will not be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 until next year, unless vaccine supplies get a big boost, LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said this week.
Although he expressed optimism that the pace of vaccinations will accelerate as more doses become available and additional vaccines are approved, Garcetti acknowledged that math is a challenge in a county that about 10 million people call home.
Both therapies currently approved for public use in the United States – one from Pfizer-BioNTech and the other from Moderna – require two doses administered weeks apart. So, said Garcetti, when you count “the 7.5 million of the 10 million people that the county’s Department of Public Health expects to receive vaccination”, you end up having a general need for 15 million doses.
In comparison, said Garcetti, the county has received an average of about 160,000 doses per week.
Even with the 853,650 doses the county had received on Wednesday, there is still a potentially frightening gap: 14.15 million. According to the delivery rate quoted by Garcetti, it would take about 88 weeks for the vaccines to arrive to serve all Angelenos who needed the injections.
“It’s the truth, unless we get more vaccine,” said Garcetti on Thursday during an interview at Dodger Stadium, which has recently been turned into a mass vaccination site. “I believe we will get some, but we cannot get them soon.”
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 distributing 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 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 local health agencies has varied from week to week, which, according to the authorities, makes long-term vaccination planning and scheduling appointments difficult, if not impossible.
Officials in San Francisco warned this week that the 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 have been maintained for additional safety analysis – health officials said that “city suppliers do not have enough vaccine stock to serve the population current state designated to be vaccinated. “
Another factor in the vaccination puzzle 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 were now eligible for the COVID-19 vaccination. – increasing the number of Californians could be inoculated, but also causing confusion, as some counties resisted due to limited supplies.
Data on how many vaccines have been administered has also been difficult to obtain and the numbers are often delayed. However, according to the California Department of Public Health, providers reported administering nearly 1.6 million doses across the state on Tuesday.
While there is growing optimism that California is finally beating the surge in coronavirus that has devastated the state for months, the number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths remains high, and officials warn that progress is precarious.
Infection prevention protocols, such as wearing masks in public, washing your hands regularly and avoiding encounters with people outside your 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.