NEWSOM: VACCINE ROLLOUT HAS BEEN TOO SLOW
State has received about 1.3 million doses, but only 35% administered
Only about 35 percent of the COVID-19 vaccine doses that have arrived in California have been administered so far, a rate Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged Monday was “not good enough” as he pledged new funding and efforts aimed at ramping up the rollout.
California has received just under 1.3 million doses, but about 454,000 people have received the shots, according to figures Newsom presented.
Though he has regularly maintained that distribution of the longawaited vaccines would build up more rapidly over time, Newsom said the process had, to this point, “gone too slowly, I know, for many of us.”
Newsom provided no clear answer during a news conference to questions about the cause of the lag, promising “a much more aggressive posture” and additional details in the coming days.
“We want to see 100 percent of what’s received immediately administered in people’s arms, and so that’s a challenge,” he said during a briefing. “It’s a challenge across this country — it’s a challenge, for that matter, around the rest of the world. But that’s not an excuse.”
The government’s ability to quickly and effectively distribute
vaccines is crucial to California’s fight against the virus and a key test for Newsom. Though his original stay-athome order helped suppress the virus early in the pandemic, the state is now experiencing one of the highest rates of transmission in the country.
Distribution of the vaccine has been slower than anticipated across the United States. In California, the effort has been made more difficult by layers of federal, state and local rules governing the process for health care providers to prioritize patients and administer vaccines, said Matt Willis, public health officer for Marin County.
In comparison to a “come one, come all” approach to distributing a standard flu vaccine, the COVID-19 vaccine presents a “logistically and operationally more complex” undertaking for an already stressed statewide health care system, he said. In order to administer the vaccine, providers must be approved by the state. Each person who receives a vaccine must be determined to be in the appropriate tier group and registered in a data management system to ensure they receive an additional dose on time, among other hurdles.
“Our bandwidth is really constrained right now,” Willis said. “The infrastructure that would normally be dedicated to prioritizing the vaccine distribution plan is overwhelmed with surges in cases.”
Another complication that has emerged in the vaccine rollout has been making sure doses don’t go to waste. The two vaccines that are available in the U.S. — one from Pfizer-BioNTech and the other from Moderna — are packaged in vials that contain multiple doses, each with a limited shelf life of roughly six hours after it’s opened.
State officials have pledged to punish those who try to abuse their power or position to jump into the vaccination queue before their appointed time — a warning that has made some providers hesitant to administer leftover doses to those outside the first tier group of frontline health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities such as nursing homes.
In some instances, nonfront-line workers have been offered the vaccine when a surplus occurred after all eligible staff were reportedly granted access. Under state guidelines released last month, health departments and facilities may offer vaccine to people in lower-priority groups when demand eases and doses are about to expire.
This week, the administration issued what Willis described as a “course correct” to give local health departments more latitude to broadly vaccinate health care workers, instead of following earlier state guidance to prioritize primary care clinics over specialty clinics, for example.
Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s Health and Human Services secretary, said the federal government gives California a weekly vaccine allocation and the state determines which counties will receive those doses. The local jurisdictions work with health care providers in their areas and vaccines are shipped directly from manufacturers to vaccination sites.
Ghaly also said the state is working to clarify that vaccinators should not let remaining doses go to waste.
“The bottom line is there’s a lot of complexities with the vaccine initiative, and we want to make sure the state of California doesn’t contribute to that complexity,” Ghaly said.
Ghaly said the state will continue to prioritize populations that are most vulnerable because of their exposures to the virus and potential health risks.