⏩ Equity: Bay Area counties getting money to vaccinate the poor.

Bay Area counties will receive nearly $8 million to help vaccinate their poorest residents against the coronavirus after local officials complained that the region was largely left out of state equity efforts.

State Sen. Dave Cortese, DSan Jose, said Wednesday that Gov. Gavin Newsom has agreed to provide about $7.6 million to expand COVID19 vaccine access in communities at higher risk of infection, including expanding vaccination sites and hiring outreach workers.

Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties will each receive $1.5 million, according to Cortese’s office. San Francisco and San Mateo counties will each receive $750,000, and Marin, Napa, Solano and Sonoma counties will each receive $400,000.

“This is a step in the right direction, but not nearly all that is needed to assist those that are suffering from a clear geographic and socioeconomic disadvantage,” Cortese said in a statement. “COVID19 has only underscored the urgency of eliminating socioeconomic barriers and advancing health equity in our state.”

The money is the result of weeks of discussion between Bay Area legislators and the governor’s office over a shift in the state’s vaccine distribution strategy. Earlier this month, the Newsom administration announced that it would begin allocating 40% of doses to residents in more than 400 of the state’s lowestincome ZIP codes, an attempt to address a disparity in who has been able to get shots.

But a Chronicle analysis found that only 2% of people who would benefit from the program lived in the Bay Area, even though the region represents 20% of California’s population and has many needy communities. Five of the nine counties — Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Sonoma and Napa — were excluded from the plan altogether.

Hundreds of local officials and community organizations urged the state to reconsider its criteria, but meetings between lawmakers and the governor’s office seemed to reach an impasse. In midMarch, 20 legislators, representing nearly the entire Bay Area delegation, sent a letter to the Newsom administration denouncing the changes to vaccine distribution.

“This is a matter of life and death for our community,” they wrote. “This plan needs to be restructured and recalibrated immediately.”

“It was The Chronicle that explained to us three weeks ago that this equity rollout was flawed,” Cortese said. “That gave us the impetus to circulate our letter, and recognize that we’d better have some solidarity to get this rectified.”

Yet, counties are clamoring for more vaccine doses, especially as eligibility for the inoculation expands Thursday to people as young as 50, which raises the question of how money can help counties achieve vaccine equity.

Cortese said that in discussions with the state, a neutral administrator overseeing the negotiations said California will soon have plenty of vaccine — including “over a half a million doses of Johnson & Johnson,” the singledose variety. So the Bay Area representatives decided that money would be beneficial, as long as counties had flexibility in how to spend it within hardhit communities.

Cortese gave the example of Gardner Health Services in San Jose, which would be able to open for only three days a week at Mexican Heritage Plaza without money from this deal.

“In Santa Clara County, they have the capacity overall to deliver a couple hundred thousand doses each week,” he said. “But separately, from an equity standpoint, they haven’t had the case resources to expand community based clinics” like Gardner.

Bay Area counties learned about the windfall Wednesday and said they haven’t had time to figure out how to spend it. But they said they were pleased.

“We are appreciative of the additional funding and we are working on a plan to invest it in our ongoing efforts to achieve community immunity in Napa County,” said Dr. Karen Relucio, the county’s public health officer.

In Solano County, spokeswoman Jayleen Richards said this year has “highlighted the need for investments in the local public health infrastructure to respond to this pandemic and future pandemics.”

The $400,000 aimed at Marin and Sonoma counties “will further increase the North Bay’s capacity to get shots into the arms of people that need them as quickly as possible,” Assemblyman Marc Levine (DSan Rafael) said in a statement.

Contra Costa County health providers are “responding to the largest public health mobilization in recent history,” said Scott Alonso, a county spokesman. “Resources of all kinds are appreciated to get doses out in the community and put to good use, especially where work with our historically marginalized communities is concerned.”

Yet, Cortese said he still wants the state to rework its vaccine equity program to include the Bay Area.

He said: “Let’s redo the metrics and roll out Vaccine Equity 2.0 next week.”