The COVID-19 vaccination station near Petco Park will close on Friday and Saturday due to cold winter storms that have spread much of the U.S. and frozen vaccines.
The site may remain closed on Sunday and Monday, depending on when the next dose doses arrive. Everyone with an appointment during closing will be scheduled through UC San Diego’s MyChart system, according to county and UCSD spokesmen.
Other vaccination sites in San Diego County are also affected. A site run by Palomar Health in downtown Escondido closes Friday, but resumes operations Saturday. And a superstation run by CSU San Marcos and the province is currently only offering second doses. The same goes for more than a dozen smaller vaccine sites across the region. First-dose appointments will be automatically rescheduled by MyTurn, the state’s online vaccination registration and scheduling system.
Sharp HealthCare, which operates mass vaccination stations in Chula Vista and La Mesa, continues to offer the first and second doses of Pfizer vaccines from its existing offering and will reschedule the vaccinations for Moderna’s vaccinations.
According to a spokesperson, Scripps Health, which operates a super station at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, has enough vaccine to meet appointments through the weekend. And UCSD will continue to manage a campus site at RIMAC Arena to vaccinate staff, faculty, and UCSD Health patients.
Of all the things that could delay the deployment of the vaccine in San Diego County, it seems the most guilty again. Temperatures hovered in the upper 60s at San Diego International Airport on Thursday afternoon, just a few miles from Petco Park super station.
According to the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center, about 70 percent of the United States is covered in snow. These include Michigan and Massachusetts, where Moderna and Pfizer manufacture much of their vaccine stock, respectively.
This is the second time that the superstation in the city center has closed, as the website was shut down from last Sunday to Tuesday after a group of Moderna vaccines did not arrive on time. Provincial officials say they still do not know the reason for the delay in shipping last week.
“A second set of delays is going to affect our system very significantly,” county superintendent Nathan Fletcher said during Wednesday’s coronavirus briefing. “I think people understand that we do not control the weather, and that we do not control the arrival of vaccines.”
Many San Diegans who will be affected by the delays are those who need second doses, as the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are needed three and four weeks later, respectively, to maximize immunity to the coronavirus. There are about 366,000 San Diegans who received their first dose but who still need the second, according to the province’s online vaccine panel.
It is unclear exactly how many people will have to make appointments for the coming days, but a UCSD spokesman said almost all of the appointments were at the Petco Park location for second doses this week. The superstar usually vaccinates about 5,000 San Diegans a day.
Any delay in the second doses can cause frustration and anxiety. But dr. Mark Sawyer, an infectious disease expert at Rady Children’s Hospital, says there is no real cause for concern.
“While these vaccine problems may delay your second dose, it will eventually be fine,” Sawyer said. “As long as you finally get the total number of doses you are supposed to get, you offer the same protection.”
He is well acquainted with the matter. Sawyer served on the committees that recommended that the Food and Drug Administration authorize the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. He is also part of a vaccine advisory committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sawyer’s comments reflect the guidance of the CDC, which recommends that you get your second dose of COVID-19 vaccine within six weeks of the first dose, but the agency adds that it is not necessary to start the process again if you survey later does not come.
There are many other vaccines that require more than one dose, including sketches against tetanus, measles and whooping cough. In such cases, Sawyer says, the exact timing of follow-up doses is not critical and is somewhat arbitrary.
Example: Pfizer and Moderna require second shots 21 and 28 days later, respectively. Why not 22 and 29 days later? Because it’s easier to tell people to come back within three or four weeks, and so the clinical trials that tested the vaccines were set up.
However, there are some basic principles that guide the timing of second doses. It takes about two weeks to set up an initial vaccine reaction, and you do not want to get a second chance while still reacting to the first reaction. Many of the cells activated by the vaccine eventually die when the immune response decreases. But subsequent doses kick the reaction back into gear, producing higher levels of antibodies, which are Y-shaped proteins that can cover a virus and block infection, and T cells, which can kill virus-infected cells.
The main reason for getting the second dose sooner rather than later, Sawyer says, is that the current vaccines are about 95 percent effective in preventing people who got both shots from getting sick with COVID-19. Many older adults can use that protection; people 65 and older, according to the CDC, accounted for 80 percent of the deaths COVID-19.
“We are better off making sure that people at high risk are fully vaccinated, because they are likely to get very ill,” he said.
Although the vaccine explosion in the region still did not reach most of San Diegans, local COVID-19 statistics gradually improved. On Thursday, the province reported 36 COVID-19 deaths and 810 new infections. This is a slight increase in cases, but the country reported nearly 20,000 test results on Thursday, compared to nearly 14,000 on Wednesday. In the latest report, 95 new COVID-19 hospitalizations and 772 total hospitalizations were noted; almost a month ago, there were about 1,700 COVID-19 patients in hospitals in the region.