UC GETS VACCINE SUPPLY FROM STATE

Employees of university system being vaccinated before others off campus

Essential workers at UC San Diego are not waiting in the same vaccination lines as their off-campus peers, university officials confirmed this week.

County officials announced Wednesday that teachers, law enforcement officers, farmers and others — a group estimated to exceed 500,000 people throughout the region — can start signing up for vaccination appointments through state or county-operated scheduling systems Saturday. But similar opportunities have already been afforded to UCSD employees.

And, while the county warned that it will not have enough supply on hand to make much of a dent in the expected demand for doses among the droves of workers likely to start requesting appointments this weekend, the UC system, officials confirmed in an email Tuesday, receives a vaccine allocation directly from the California Department of Public Health that “is separate from vaccine supplied by the County of San Diego for other operations.”

It was unclear Thursday afternoon exactly when the broader effort started on campus. The university did not specify the start date, but two local residents connected to the university who requested anonymity out of concerns for their continued employment said they thought the effort got going in earnest last week.

One of the two said they were

surprised to learn that a teacher’s assistant in their 20s had received their first dose at a time when widespread vaccination of local school teachers has not yet begun.

In a statement, the university said that it has begun vaccinating “frontline essential employees,” including “emergency response personnel, housing and dining workers and other essential employees working on campus.”

The university said it is following CDPH guidelines in deciding who to vaccinate. Those guidelines do include “all staff in colleges, universities, junior colleges, community colleges and other postsecondary facilities.”

As an entity that is legally separate from the county where it resides, the university does have some leeway in who it decides to vaccinate and when.

In a statement, the CDPH noted that it considers the University of California to be a “multi-county entity” able to receive vaccine for inoculation of its patients and employees in addition to the public.

That designation has sent a significant number of doses directly to UCSD, with a statewide dashboard maintained by CDPH listing the university with 24,820 doses on hand as of Wednesday, significantly more than were listed for any other UC campus. It was unclear, though, whether all of those doses were part of the university’s allocation or whether some came from the county to supply UCSD’s mass vaccination clinic near Petco Park. That facility does serve the public.

UC, however, does seem to have a leg up on its peers where vaccine supply is concerned. A representative of California State University, which operates 23 campuses statewide, confirmed in an email Thursday that its locations receive doses from their respective county public health agencies.

UCSD has made state and national headlines for its vaccination might. Working with the San Diego Padres baseball team and San Diego County, it was the first in California to set up a vaccination superstation capable of putting thousands of vaccines in arms per day. As of Wednesday, the university reported having administered 146,504 total doses, with about 120,000 at Petco. More than 40,000 first and second doses are said to have gone to UCSD health system patients with more than 20,000 firsts and seconds going to health system employees.

It was not clear whether the employee numbers included non-health care workers.

Since the first few thousand doses began arriving at local hospitals in December, vaccination prioritization has seemed as sensitive an issue as beach access at the La Jolla children’s pool.

Health systems who have received supply to vaccinate their workers have faced significant grumbling for any doses that land outside the group that works directly with patients.

Scripps Health, for example, received some backlash for vaccinating its board of directors which it said was made up either of trustees who intended to volunteer in its hospitals during the frenetic holiday surge or who were old enough to meet the 65 and over age criteria.

In December, Sharp HealthCare found itself rapidly gathering a group of local police officers to receive doses left over from walk-in clinics for its employees, noting that, because they could not be refrozen, they would be wasted if not put in arms immediately.

That thin margin, the merest possibility that there might be more such doses available at the last minute, has sometimes created a line in front of UCSD’s Petco superstation.

And the state, under a “vaccinate the vaccinators” mandate, has given priority to anyone trained to give inter-muscular shots in hopes that they might volunteer for future mass vaccination clinics. Many, many volunteers will be required as vaccine supply increases, allowing the inoculation effort to reach the bulk of the population not deemed to be at elevated risk of infection.

All along the way from December through February, some have argued that teachers should be moved further up the list so that K-12 students can get back to in-person learning as quickly as possible while others have pushed for police officers and deputy sheriffs whose jobs often require physical contact, whether offering first aid before paramedics arrive or making arrests.

Jack Schaeffer, president of the San Diego Police Officer’s Association, said that while it is difficult to understand how officers serving UCSD’s La Jolla campus could be prioritized over officers routinely dispatched to a much wider, and less predictable, range of locations, the recent announcement that appointments will be made available starting Saturday does help smooth the waters.

“It starts to feel like a bit of a moot point now, because it seems like we are seeing them broaden out the priority,” Schaeffer said.

But, it does appear that campus workers will continue to enjoy more immediate access to vaccine because the UC system has its own dedicated vaccine supply that is not open to all comers.

Why shouldn’t university workers draw from, and wait for, the same supply as their off-campus peers with similar risk profiles? Neither the California Department of Public Health nor the University of California president’s office responded to the question this week.

Thursday’s coronavirus tracking report listed 519 new cases, with the pace of the pandemic seeming to settle into a new groove that remains under 1,000, but still isn’t dropping low enough for the county to escape the most-restrictive tier of the state’s reopening system.