Bay Area Province officials this week expressed great frustration over the fact that the state has allocated precious vaccines, saying that they are not receiving enough doses and that the supply is unpredictable.
Officials say the chaotic system makes it difficult to plan how many doses can be administered on a given day, and how many staff are needed for it. Many provinces also say that they have the capacity to administer many more doses, even if they could only get it from the state.
As local hospitals face a record spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths, California has lagged behind nearly every other state in the rate of vaccinations. Legislators and medical professions are urging the California Department of Public Health to provide more transparency about its distribution plan – or, at the very least, a little more predictable for how many doses provinces will receive each week.
“It’s hard to plan,” a San Francisco Department of Public Health spokesman said. ‘It’s like having a wedding for 200 people, and the caterer says you might be able to get food for 25 people or maybe get food for 500 people. This is very challenging. ”
The amount of vaccine that provinces receive each week also varies greatly. San Francisco received 3,900 doses in the first week of January and then the following week 11,825. Next week, the province was told it would receive 4,275 doses – a huge drop for no reason.
Although most of California’s doses are given to major health care providers, such as Kaiser and Sutter Health, provincial departments are also responsible for vaccinating tens of thousands of frontline workers and those without insurance.
Darrel Ng, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health, said provinces will begin to see larger amounts of the vaccine and more predictability in stock as manufacturing accelerates. California’s inventory is controlled by the federal government.
Land officials still say the lack of predictability has a major downside to them.
“You do not know how many volunteers you need, how many chairs to pull out or whether it is worthwhile (to set up a website) if you do not know when the vaccine will come, and how many you will not get,” he said. Monica Gandhi, a specialist in infectious diseases at UCSF, said. “Their hands are tied.”
San Francisco has received 33,975 doses so far and as of Thursday, 12,330 shots have been given to people. According to the province, the health department expects all the available doses to be used in the next week, and is asking for another “large volume order” from the state.
However, the country said it was still hampered by ‘inconsistent distribution’ and ‘operational challenges’. These include: some doses are given to facilities that are still expanding their operations, and uncertainty about what kind of vaccine they will get – Pfizer or Moderna. The brand is important because people need two doses of the same vaccine, with a few weeks apart.
Many of the available stock is also set aside for second doses.
In the province of Santa Clara, Jeff Jeff, provincial executive officer, said the public health department asked for 100,000 doses on Sunday, but was told on Tuesday that it would only receive 6,000. Meanwhile, Marin experienced the opposite problem this week: 6,000 more doses than officials expected.
Provincial health official Matt Willis said the extra doses were “exactly the problem”, but it was difficult to suddenly scale up the distribution plan.
The Marin County Board of Supervisors sent a letter to Govin Newsom on Wednesday, saying the province has the “infrastructure ready and available for a much more robust COVID-19 public health vaccine program.” But the problem is the limited supply allocated to the province.
Dennis Rodoni, president of the Board of Supervisors, noted that nearly 30% of Marin’s population is over 60. He urged the governor to prioritize provinces with high-risk populations, as well as a willingness to deliver vaccines in much larger volumes. ”
Every state in the country is dealing with a nationally limited vaccine supply and is constantly shifting the regulations of the Trump administration. But California has been particularly slow in getting people into its arms: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 975,293 doses were given as of Thursday, out of the approximately 3.5 million doses the state received.
That equates to about 28% of the shots used, which puts California far behind the majority of states.
Nearly 50 state lawmakers sent a letter to Newsom on Wednesday demanding a “reliable forecast” and weekly updates on how much vaccine each country will receive in the coming month.
“We are all aware of the limited number of vaccinations that have been made available to the states,” the letter read. “But we believe we need to plan for a more efficient and effective deployment of these vaccines so that we can further improve the public health of Californians and begin to build our state.”
The state health department is working to speed up the distribution of vaccines. Meanwhile, the agency told The Chronicle on Wednesday that it does not intend to change the current process for sending vaccines to locations and hospitals.
The state is expected to launch a website and a call center next week so people have a better idea of when they will be eligible for a vaccine. Newsom also weakened state guidelines Wednesday to enable those 65 and older to receive the vaccine. But this step will not address the criticism of provincial officials.
Some provinces are unclear about how and when the newly eligible population will be able to succeed. The San Mateo County Department of Health said Thursday that it does not have enough doses of the vaccine to move on to the next phase and get those over 65 vaccinated, and would rather focus on vaccinating health workers.
The state distributes doses to each country under the guidance of the federal government. Most of California’s supply went to local health care systems, such as Kaiser and Sutter.
The system has also frustrated local politicians, who say they have been left in the dark about how many vaccines are available to their residents through private providers. Lawmakers in Santa Clara and San Francisco have appealed to the major health care systems to regularly disclose how many doses they have been given by the state.
While California is struggling to increase vaccine distribution, more than 450 Californians die every day from COVID-19.
“It’s awful,” said Gandhi, the UCSF infectious disease specialist. “The irony is that you can only get out of here with vaccinations.”
Trisha Thadani is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @TrishaThadani