SACRAMENTO – As California enters the final stretch of its ten-day sprint to vaccinate a million more people against COVID-19, the state is far from its goal – another possible blow to Gavin Newsom’s government’s introduction of the coronavirus -vaccine.
To reach the million-vaccine target set by Newsom, health officials will have to get another 500,000 shots into people’s arms by the end of Friday, doubling their pace in recent days. California had already administered nearly half a million doses when the governor set his goal last week, and according to the state Department of Public Health, it stood at 971,829 on Wednesday.
Sahar Robertson, a spokesman for Newsom, said data up to Thursday were not yet available because it takes the vaccine providers time to report how many doses they have administered. She said the state will have a full picture next week of its progress in meeting the benchmark.
“By reaching this goal, we have undoubtedly seen an increase in the rate of vaccinations, and we look forward to continuing to work with local provinces and the health system to achieve our goal,” Robertson said in said a statement.
The vaccine’s distribution has far exceeded expectations nationwide, but California’s rollout has been criticized as particularly slow and confusing. The state reports that according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, local health departments and hospital systems have used only about one-third of the doses they have received among the worst doses in the country.
Since last week, Newsom has repeatedly promised that the state will vaccinate another 1 million people by Friday. He suggested that the goal was to increase the urgency surrounding the vaccination of Californians.
“The reason we are setting a target of 1 million is that we are sending an urgent call across the spectrum,” Newsom said at a news conference on Monday. He said California needed a “practical approach to accelerating the fair and safe distribution of vaccines.”
But the governor’s intention to adopt daring goals, such as a sudden increase to 1 million vaccinations, could backfire on him if the state falls short.
Rob Stutzman, a Republican political consultant, said confidence in Newsom’s response to the pandemic had already been undermined by public outrage over a dinner he attended at the French laundromat in Yountville in November and an unfolding scandal involving major unemployment fraud . Now he may also develop the reputation of not being able to deliver the vaccine, turning his credibility into a political liability.
“He seems to have a penchant for setting up bars he can’t remove,” Stutzman said. ‘People will be forgiving if there is an impression that the best effort is being made. But if you make a promise and you can not keep it, you set yourself up for failure. ‘
According to the Department of Public Health, the clock began ticking on the ten days on January 6, when California administered approximately 480,000 doses. This means that the state intends to vaccinate almost 1.5 million people by the end of Friday.
But an analysis of state data shows that over the past eight days, California has administered an average of only 61,500 doses of vaccinations, slightly more than half of what it needed from the start to reach Newsom’s goal. The number is slowly improving, and the state reported that 82,787 people were vaccinated on Wednesday.
Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an infectious disease expert involved in the explosion of vaccines at Stanford University, said California and other states are being challenged because investment has been skewed toward vaccine development rather than the public health infrastructure that needed to get it from people.
“You can do all the high-level planning,” she said. “From the beginning, we have never had money at the federal level for this last mile.”
Attention has also recently been drawn to California’s complex system of giving preference to who should be vaccinated, starting with health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities. The state has relaxed these rules this week, making them eligible for anyone 65 or older as it seeks ways to speed up vaccinations.
Dr. George Rutherford, an infectious disease expert at UCSF, said government officials would rightly address ethical questions about who should be vaccinated first, but the plans were thwarted by the complicated logistics of distribution.
“This is probably an example of the perfect enemy of the good,” he said.
Rutherford added that he prefers the direction of a system of mass vaccination sites, to simplify the process of reaching a large number of patients at once: “Let’s just move people through.”
Alexei Koseff is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @akoseff