Vaccine bottleneck will cost lives
California and the country are seizing failure from the brink of a rare success against the pandemic. Two highly effective, hightech vaccines against the coronavirus have been developed and authorized at a recordshattering pace, but they continue to be distributed and administered with all the speed and efficiency of a horse and buggy.
Just over a quarter of the vaccine doses sent to California had entered a human body as of Thursday, ranking it among the slowest states in a generally halting national effort. Its 27.5% administration rate was worse than all but three other states. Meanwhile, nearly half of Texas’ doses and threequarters of West Virginia’s had been pressed into useful service.
One culprit is an all too familiar pattern of the benighted pandemic response. As with business closures, testing and tracing, and other aspects of managing the crisis, the federal government has shifted responsibility for the vaccination effort to the states, and California has done much the same to counties. Both Washington and Sacramento have offered guidelines that often serve to frustrate and confuse their recipients while failing to provide consistent coordination, communication and support.
With wellintended federal and state guidelines prioritizing health care workers and others potentially slowing progress, particularly with alarming numbers of health care workers declining vaccination, the Trump and Newsom administrations successively urged offering the shots to everyone 65 or older. That made sense, but with more than 6 million Californians in that cohort, it had the drawback of opening vaccination to more residents than counties and health systems have the capacity and volume to treat. Senior citizens and their loved ones were left to scramble for appointments with little to no guidance on how to do so, while hundreds of restaurant workers and others in Alameda and Santa Clara counties showed up for shots based on bad information — only to be told they were still being reserved for health care workers.
The expected opening of mass vaccination sites in San Francisco and other cities should help clear up the confusion and catch up with demand. So should another overdue boost to the effort, the federal funding package passed in December after months of dithering and obstruction by the Senate and the Trump administration. Presidentelect Joe Biden has rightly proposed much more in a newly unveiled stimulus plan, while Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest budget also includes additional vaccination funding.
Newsom also announced a new system to notify residents of their vaccine eligibility beginning next week. That’s a late but welcome start toward filling the information and coordination void afflicting the state’s vaccinations.
Sure, California is vast and complicated, but so is Texas. With record numbers of Californians being killed by the virus, the state must do better lest that many more lives be needlessly lost.