State mulls who gets shots next
tary Mark Ghaly said Tuesday.
During the committee’s last public meeting on Dec. 16, it considered including in this next group child care workers, K12 and university personnel, firefighters and police officers, and workers in food manufacturing, restaurants and pharmacies. Statewide, nearly 12 million workers, or twothirds of the workforce, are defined as essential, said Dr. Oliver Brooks, chief medical officer of the Los Angeles health care provider Watts Healthcare Corp. and cochair of a separate state committee in charge of drafting prioritization guidelines.
The two committees work together and advise the state on vaccine policies. They are considering several criteria for how to prioritize workers within that large second group of essential workers. Those criteria include occupational exposure, societal and economic impact of the job and equity.
A federal advisory committee for the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over the weekend recommended that the next group include frontline essential workers — including teachers, police officers, firefighters and grocery store workers — and people 75 and older.
States have leeway to come up with their own recommendations, but most take cues from the federal committee and will likely adopt similar recommendations, though perhaps with some variations.
California received its first vaccine shipments last week, and has inoculated at least 70,258 people so far with the first dose of the twodose Pfizer vaccine, which was the first to receive U. S. regulatory authorization. A second vaccine, made by Moderna, began arriving at hospitals and local health departments Monday.