No uniform system for state’s mass vaccine rollout

SACRAMENTO (AP) — With demand for the Coronavirus vaccine vastly outpacing supply, California’s efforts to methodically plan who gets a vaccine and when are quickly being thrown out the window.

At Lompoc Valley Medical Center, officials had planned to give out 100 doses to people 75 and older on Wednesday, its first day of vaccinations. But word-of-mouth quickly traveled through the small city in Santa Barbara County and by day’s end 350 people had received a shot, many without the required appointment, hospital chief executive Steve Popkin said.

“Understandably, there was a lot of excitement among these members of our community,” he said in an email.

Chuck Ruffner, 74 and with an underlying health condition, was among those inoculated. He got a call Wednesday morning from a friend, who learned through their mutual medical group that shots were available. Ruffner arrived, got vaccinated in 20 minutes and called two friends who came to the hospital to get their shots.

None had appointments. Ruffner didn’t even know what brand of vaccine he received until he checked the next morning.

“It didn’t matter,” he said. “I was just so anxious to get it.”

It’s just one example of vaccine providers not adhering to their own schedules or the rules created by the state, which itself angered many local health officials by quickly adding those over 65 to the priority list this week, despite severe vaccine shortages. More than 10 million people are now eligible for vaccines but only about 900,000 have gotten shots.

Sometimes those providing vaccinations encounter unforeseen problems, like a broken freezer at a Northern California hospital that set off a scramble to quickly use 850 doses. A Southern California hospital vaccinated local first responders after too few health care workers wanted available doses.

Elsewhere, counties are offering vaccines to different groups of people and turning to a variety of methods to notify them when it’s their turn. In Fresno County, for example, anyone over 75 can make an appointment on the county website’s homepage for a vaccination at the local fairgrounds. Yolo County has a Google form people can fill out. San Francisco, meanwhile, hasn’t adopted a central approach to inform the general public.

“The county should serve as a onestop-shop to ensure everyone has the information and access to the vaccine, and the county is still not providing that function,” San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney said. “Most of our residents, even ones that should be a priority, are totally in the dark.”

A Tuesday directive by the federal government to vaccinate people over 65 complicated things further; California’s state public health department was still in the stage of suggesting only health care workers and those in nursing homes and similar facilities be vaccinated, even as many counties were moving beyond that.

The problems aren’t unique to California. In Nashville, the city’s public health department announced that people can throw their name in a lottery that would give them a chance to snag any vaccine doses that may be leftover at the end of the day. On the first day the lottery was offered, the city received 15,000 entries and two people were eventually selected to be given a leftover vaccine dose.