As millions become vaccine eligible, can California’s supply and technology keep up?
The expansion of COVID-19 vaccine eligibility to everyone age 50 and older will be the biggest test yet for California’s vaccine effort, which has stabilized recently but still faces questions about whether supply and appointments can keep pace with demand.
Millions more Californians qualify for a shot starting Thursday, and in two weeks, all residents 16 and older will be eligible.
For most people, actually getting a dose will involve wading into California’s vast array of appointment websites run by local health departments, private health providers and clinics, several major pharmacy chains and the state, through a portal called My Turn.
Public health officials are urging newly eligible people to be patient while searching for an appointment because the supply of vaccine doses coming from the federal government is still constrained in some places. Officials in several major counties have said they could vaccinate far more people if they received more supplies.
Officials in Los Angeles County estimate it has the capacity to administer 700,000 doses per week, but supplies have yet to reach that level.
“It’s impossible for us not to be alerting people to the fact that they are going to perhaps need to wait for a couple of weeks before they’re going to be able to get those appointments,” L.A. County public health director Barbara Ferrer said Wednesday.
An estimated 1.4 million L.A.
County residents will become eligible April 1, and nearly 4 million people ages 16 and older will become eligible April 15, Ferrer said.
Across the state, more than 30% of residents have received at least one dose of the vaccine, totaling more than 18 million doses.
State and local officials have continued to prioritize equity in the vaccine distribution — a key to the state’s reopening plan — but ongoing constraints in supply could further hinder those efforts to reach the hardest-hit communities.
In Los Angeles, Ferrer said capacity is not going to be a limiting factor.
“As soon as there’s an increase in doses, we’re going to be able to translate that immediately to more appointments for people who are eligible to get vaccinated,” she said, noting that the county this week received fewer than 400,000 doses, which limited the number of appointments it could provide.
Officials have been relying on an influx of doses in April to keep pace with the growing eligibility, with Ferrer on Wednesday projecting that if L.A. could continue to acquire 576,000 or more doses per week by the end of April, more than 80% of the county could be vaccinated by the end of June. Yet Johnson & Johnson said late Wednesday that a batch of vaccine failed quality standards and can’t be used.
Ferrer said L.A. County had been anticipating that about 20% of its doses over the next three months would be Johnson & Johnson. The drugmaker didn’t say how many doses were lost, and it wasn’t clear how the problem would affect future deliveries.
Officials in Santa Clara have also warned that while demand increases, supply has remained limited.
“We’ve had scarcity of vaccine and that continues,” Santa Clara County COVID-19 testing and vaccine officer Dr. Marty Fenstershieb said earlier this week.
The tight supplies are also translating to difficulty securing appointments, many Californians said.
My Turn, the state’s online appointment hub, was prone to glitches at the start of the vaccine rollout. To date, 2 million of the state’s 18 million administered doses have been booked through the site.
The issues have mostly improved as vaccine supply and appointment availability have increased. But in addition to the state site, a patchwork of websites operated by local health departments, private health providers and several major pharmacies have sprung up to meet growing demand. Some counties — and residents — have abandoned the platform altogether.
Billed as a one-stop shop for an appointment, My Turn does not include slots from many of the state’s biggest providers, including health chains such as Kaiser Permanente, retail pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens, third-party providers such as Carbon Health in Los Angeles and Othena in Orange County, and smaller clinics that operate on a platform called Calvax.
“It is a genuine challenge to find an appointment,” said Echo Park resident David A.L. Venable, 29, whose severe asthma puts him at high risk for COVID-19. “That My Turn is a pain and challenge to navigate to this extent does not bode well for the expansion.”