How Bakersfield Became a COVID-19 Vaccine Mecca in California

As soon as Justin Perez leaves the vaccination clinic, his phone buzzes with an SMS.

A former co-worker has heard a serious rumor about a clinic where anyone, even young people like them, can get a COVID-19 vaccine. The clinic was in Bakersfield.

“I’m in Bakersfield,” Perez, a 35-year-old video designer from Sherman Oaks, texted to confirm the rumor. “I was injected 20 minutes ago.”

Cal State Bakersfield has been the vaccine for young and healthy people from Los Angeles County for more than a week, since the message spread that the dose has more doses than patients – thousands more – and no restriction on age, fitness. or country of residence. Some vaccine seekers were writers, engineers and Hollywood actors, who said the site welcomed Angelenos with open arms.

Thousands of Southern California residents have moved across the Grapevine and to the Central Valley in recent days. By Monday night, ‘Bakersfield’ was working on Twitter, spurred on by a spate of vaccine hunters who are young, healthy and have time to take a four-hour return trip. Although many are eligible for the shot at home in a week, there is no guarantee that appointments will be available immediately.

Bakersfield’s open door policy felt a bit surreal for some patients, especially compared to the busy, strict vaccination clinics in LA County. Some described stormy windy days and woke up with the assumption that they would have to wait weeks to be vaccinated, after seeing a stream of cheerful social media messages, and decided to drive up the 5 highway and two hours later the chance to get.

“All the way there, and all the way back, my friend and I were a little dazed,” said Julie Greiner, 25, a Glendale comedy writer who got ice cream to celebrate her vaccination. “We were like, did it really happen?”

According to officials from Kaiser Permanente, which helps run the clinic, the excess of the site is due at least in part to a relatively high rate of vaccinations in Kern County, among evangelical Christians and low-income residents. In addition, Kern is young: about 11% of the province’s residents are 65 or older, which means that many residents, perhaps the majority, have only been eligible for vaccination in the last few weeks.

About 24% of people living in Kern County received at least one dose, compared to 33% of residents nationwide, according to the Los Angeles Times vaccine survey.

Bakersfield officials say it is true that everyone 16 and older is vaccinated. But they stopped encouraging visitors outside the city, warning that the clinic was intended to serve Kern County residents, and that the local appointment system was reserved.

“When officials planned the site, the idea that people from other provinces would arrive did not really occur to us,” said David Womack, senior vice president of Kaiser Permanente in Kern County. But the word spread quickly. the third day, staff members noticed visitors, nurses seeing several hundred patients in Southern California a day, he said.

“We have the ability, we have the vaccine – it would be a crime to turn people away,” Womack said. “We want to get a shot in the arms.”

About two-thirds of patients have no appointments, Womack said. The walk-in policy, which is rare for mega-websites, is designed to improve access to vaccines for the elderly and others who have struggled with the state’s hiring software.

That site opened on March 26th. During the first week, about 900 people were vaccinated per day, less than 20% of the daily capacity for 5,400 shots. About 2,500 people were vaccinated on Monday, and the site was on track to reach that record on Tuesday, Womack said.

The site’s popularity expanded last weekend when actor Wil Wheaton, known for his role in ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, told his 1.1 million Instagram fans that he had visited it. After getting a Pfizer BioNTech jab, he writes in a photo caption, he “cried a little” of relief.

“It’s so quick and easy, and you do not jump the line or take anyone away for a while,” Wheaton, 48, said. When he arrived at the site, he said, the process took 40 minutes.

Womack warned that the clinic could start restricting the onset of appointments or restricting them to certain times of the day, as it would significantly delay the check-in process. He added: “When the day comes that we have to do it, we just ask people to understand it.”

Local officials are evaluating the levels of hesitation against the vaccine among black residents, Latino immigrants and white evangelists and how it should be addressed, said Kristin Weber, the interim director of Kaiser in Kern County. She said the province is working to make the shots available at churches, and community groups are spreading the word about the vaccine.

There are some people who ‘believe a lot of weird things’, said Chris Lewis, a construction worker, while eating a sandwich in his truck outside PorkChop & Bubba’s BBQ near Bakersfield High School. But for the most part, his co-workers seem to be open to the idea of ​​being vaccinated.

Lewis said he planned to get the chance this year, but he was not in a hurry since he recently had COVID-19.

At the campus vaccination site, cars with license plate frames from dealers in El Monte, Hollywood, Glendale, Alhambra, Carson and Santa Monica were dotted across the parking lot on Tuesday morning.

When patients walked out, workers with orange T-shirts ate, cheered and cheered. One shouted, ‘Congratulations! Tell your friends! ”To a couple wearing Dodgers hats as they walk back to their car holding hands.

After being vaccinated on Tuesday, Michael Vargas (24) stopped for a selfie with a cardboard lid of dr. Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert, jokes: “Is it to scale?”

Vargas, a Bakersfield resident who works in pest control, said he was eligible recently but was afraid to find an appointment. When a friend who attended Cal State Bakersfield told him he could be vaccinated by walking in, he decided to stop. He was vaccinated less than an hour later.

The process was so easy that Vargas said he planned to encourage his friends and family to come.

Max Folkman, a 33-year-old writer of video games from West Hollywood, drove up with his roommate early in the morning after seeing success stories spread on Twitter and Reddit. A few days earlier, during a drive to Seattle, a friend pulled off the 5 freeway and vaccinated.

Folkman was pleasantly surprised by the rafting vaccination, he said – and as they walked back to the parking lot, past several workers cheering them on, they saw a hedgehog standing next to their car.

“It looked like a good omen,” Folkman said.

Karla Hernández, 35, who lives in Koreatown, LA, was concerned that Central Valley residents would not be vaccinated because of misinformation in the community.

She stops at the Los Reyes Market in south Bakersfield after being vaccinated, before returning to LA. She spoke to some employees and asked if they knew about the campus site and assured them that the vaccine is safe.

“It’s worrying to me that there are not enough people leaving Bakersfield,” she said.