San Francisco will soon open three major vaccination centers in the city, and officials hope to eventually administer at least 10,000 doses a day, Mayor London Breed said on Friday.
One website is likely to open on City College’s main campus by the end of next week. But there is one major obstacle that keeps the city from opening up to the others: California’s limited vaccine supply, which is unpredictably spread across the state.
“We are ready for more doses, we need more doses and we are asking for more doses,” a visibly frustrated Breed said at a Friday news conference. ‘We can pick up and open these sites as soon as we have the vaccines. We mobilize the whole city. ”
Friday’s announcement comes after a week of finger pointing and grievances about who is to blame for California’s sluggish vaccination, which is one of the slowest in the country. Not only is the proliferation a massive logistical challenge, but it has also caused political tensions among elected officials who are all crazy about the same issues: a shortage of vaccines and a lack of certainty about when their voters will get it.
Meanwhile, hospitals are struggling with a deadly surge of cases, and new, highly contagious virus strains that could potentially cause more damage to the healthcare system. The interests can not be higher for cities, provinces and the state to get more shots in the arms of people.
“Our rate is higher than ever before, but vaccines are our way out,” said Dr. Grant Colfax, director of public health in San Francisco, said at Friday’s event. “And we need more as soon as possible.”
San Francisco hopes to increase its distribution through a partnership with private healthcare providers – which receive the bulk of the state’s inventory – to manage the large vaccine sites. These providers include Kaiser, Sutter, Dignity Health and UCSF. This means that anyone in the city, with or without insurance, can go to the sites if it is their turn.
The sites will be located on City College’s main campus on Ocean Avenue near Interstate 280, Moscone Center in SoMa and The SF Market, a wholesale product in Bayview. Officials chose the sites because they are in or near neighborhoods hardest hit by the virus.
The Department of Public Health also plans to administer vaccines at more than a dozen community clinics and at several pop-ups across the city.
San Francisco residents have access to a website, www.sf.gov/vaccinenotify, on Tuesday, where they can submit their contact and fitness information, and then be notified by email when it’s their turn to be vaccinated. .
But given how slow vaccination has been so far, city dwellers may have been waiting a while for the email.
California applied only
San Francisco County has received 33,975 doses so far. By Friday, only 13,566 vaccines had been administered – that’s about 1,200 more than the previous day. These doses do not contain vaccines that are sent directly to the major healthcare providers.
According to Breed, all the available doses have been allocated to someone, and the city expects to use all the available doses in the next week. Officials are asking the state for another ‘large volume order’.
Yet there remain logistical issues: some vaccines have been allocated to facilities still expanding their operations, while others need to be set aside so that people can get the required second dose.
“We are not sitting on any vaccines,” Breed said. “They all move out the door.”
Officials in San Francisco – and around the Bay – have also complained that they are receiving an inconsistent and unpredictable offer from the state, making it difficult to plan how many appointments they can make or how many staff they will need given day.
San Francisco, for example, received 3,900 doses in the first week of January and 11,825 doses the following week. Next week, the province was told it would receive 4,275 doses. This is a big drop, without giving many reasons.
Meanwhile, residents eligible for the vaccine have reported massive confusion over how, when and where they can shoot. Some who called their providers for answers had to wait a few hours.
And the outraged residents flooded their elected officials with questions and wondered why the process seemed cluttered with little information, even though officials apparently had enough time to prepare.
Supervisor Matt Haney channeled this frustration this week via Twitter, and the Department of Public Health sharply criticized for what he said was a flawed approach to vaccinating residents.
He said it was ‘incredibly inappropriate and just wrong’ for private providers to primarily manage the distribution, although it is up to the state to decide who gets the doses.
Still, he called for a more aggressive deployment through the city and the construction of a mass vaccination site, such as Petco Park in San Diego and Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, which opened Friday. He is holding a hearing on Wednesday on the city’s distribution plan.
Haney’s comments angered many in the Department of Public Health and in the mayor’s office, who said they were working in the midst of a larger distribution plan – but were handcuffed by the state deficit.
Mayor Breed & DPH announces 3 mass vaccination sites, as well as community sites across the city.
This is a big, welcome shift from a week ago when their position was ‘no widespread spread of the country’.
– Matt Haney (@MattHaneySF) 15 January 2021
“I know people are asking us to set up all these sites everywhere,” Breed said Friday. “Well, we’re setting up the sites. We just did not have complete control over the vaccines. ”
The state blamed the volatile supply of the national shortage of vaccines and the lack of leadership of the federal government. As production picks up, Darrel Ng, a California Department of Public Health spokeswoman, said Thursday that provinces will begin to see larger amounts of the vaccine and have more predictability in supply.
At the news conference, Breed said she understands why people are angry and confused about the deployment of vaccines.
But just like since March, the mayor has made her city more patient.
“We have come too far to start falling apart now,” she said. “I know more than anyone, with the lives of everyone on my shoulders, how important it is to open up the city as quickly as possible.”
Trisha Thadani is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @TrishaThadani