Vaccine shortage hampers counties
Amid tight supply, appointments changed or canceled — and eligibility set to expand Monday
Bay Area vaccine providers are facing a tight supply crunch that has forced them to shift doses among clinics, curtail appointments or cancel them altogether — even as another wave of eligible Californians looms.
Starting Monday, an estimated 4 million to 6 million additional people will qualify for the potentially lifesaving injections, but they may have to wait weeks to make appointments as counties are hampered by a dearth of doses. And while the state has pledged that a reliable flow of vaccines will arrive early next month, local providers say the certainty of that delivery — let alone the exact timing — is unpredictable.
The shortage further complicates a vaccine rollout marked by chaos, confusion and frustration. But the push to inoculate as many people as possible continues: On Thursday, President Joe Biden said he wanted all adults to be eligible for vaccines by May 1. And experts say there is reason to hope that the current shortages — mainly caused by manufacturers’ challenges in ramping up production — will ease significantly by early April.
In the Bay Area, counties have scrambled all week to work around shrinking supplies. In Marin, where officials expect 2,000 doses fewer than usual next week, the health department tapped Kaiser at the last minute to cover 600 second-dose appointments. Stanford Health Care canceled more than 8,000 scheduled doses
across Santa Clara and Alameda counties. In Santa Cruz, the health department hasn’t offered new appointments all month, simply to keep up with second doses.
“We’re seeing a really erratic supply of vaccine, and it’s been just about impossible for people, whether Sutter or Stanford or UCSF or Kaiser, to really plan on what they’re going to be getting,” said John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley. “It’s led to so many people having their appointments canceled or postponed.”
Yet beginning Monday, some Californians with serious health conditions such as cancer will join the list of
13 million people already eligible. To date, the state has fully vaccinated just over 3.5 million people.
“We still have a vaccine shortage, so people do need to be patient,” said Dr. Tomás Aragón, director of the California Department of Public Health and state health officer, during an event to promote the effectiveness of the singleshot Johnson & Johnson vaccine Thursday. “We understand from projections that in early April the vaccine supply will start going up, so we expect that we’re going to have a few weeks where the vaccine will be a little bit tight. But it will open up, and people will be able to have more access to vaccines.”
Navigating the reduction at the same time that eligibility expands is “obviously the opposite of what we’d hope,” said Marin County
Health Officer Matt Willis. For now, the county will work directly with medical providers to try to secure appointments for only the most vulnerable people within the next tier.
“We’re all eager to see what we’ve been promised, which is increased transparency in the allocation process and more predictability in terms of the number of doses,” Willis said.
Santa Clara County officials were given enough vaccines to cover second doses and scheduled first doses next week, but County Executive Jeff Smith anticipates “few available appointments” for the next group of residents. On Wednesday, the health department canceled several thousand appointments it had scheduled for Kaiser patients and froze new appointments completely.
Debra Ullmann, a 67-yearold
Morgan Hill resident, spent hours on the phone to secure second doses for herself and her husband after losing their county slots planned for Thursday. Ullmann’s son drove her an hour north to Kaiser South San Francisco, while her husband got a shot in San Jose.
“First I felt like Kaiser dumped us on the county, and then the county dumped us back on Kaiser — both unceremoniously — and they both left us flailing,” Ullmann said. “It feels like it was mass chaos adding onto more mass chaos, and that, to me, is unacceptable.”
Reymundo Espinoza, CEO of Gardner Health Services, understands the anger. His team nearly canceled a vaccine clinic last week in San Jose’s Alviso neighborhood because he wasn’t certain until the last minute the organization would receive
enough vaccine.
“It’s very frustrating when you have to think about canceling,” he said during a news conference Thursday. “It’s also very frustrating to the individuals who have put this faith in all the work we have done.”
Mountain View Mayor Ellen Kamei said at the same news conference that her city recently worked with Santa Clara County to set up a vaccination site at a community center and had been looking forward to expanding — only to scrap the plan because of decreased vaccine allotment and a commensurate dip in the number of appointments they were able to offer.
On Wednesday, Biden said the federal government would purchase another 100 million doses of J&J’s vaccine, but local providers don’t know when that could reach them. John
Muir Health in Contra Costa will begin scheduling appointments for those with severe health conditions Monday but without “the promise of additional vaccine doses,” said spokesperson Ben Drew.
In Santa Cruz, where supplies have likewise been stagnant, the health department doesn’t anticipate more doses of the J&J vaccine until later in the month.
Eventually, Aragón said, the state anticipates administering 4 million doses per week, up from about 1.2 million now.
Swartzberg is optimistic that spring will bring a steadier flow of vaccine.
“The supply problem has probably got maybe a week or two at the most,” he said, “and then things are going to get a lot better.”