Frustrated by the sluggish pace of California’s COVID-19 vaccine program, state officials are taking charge with a streamlined new system they say will deliver shots to residents more quickly than the fractured and localized model they have now.
They’ll need to pick up the pace. President Joe Biden said Tuesday his new administration is ramping up delivery of vaccines to states by as much as 16 percent next week. Biden said the administration has purchased enough doses from manufacturers to have 300 million Americans vaccinated by the end of the summer or early fall.
California’s new system, announced Tuesday, aims to centralize vaccine distribution at the state level, where a new team will work with providers to send out doses and better track how quickly they get into arms, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state leaders. The goal is to make the distribution more efficient and to see in real time how the different providers are doing in reaching out to their communities and making sure people get access to shots. The state is promising to ensure that low-income and communities of color have priority access to the vaccine.
“We don’t want to have equity and speed at odds with each other,” said Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s secretary of Health and Human Services.
The new plan seems to tacitly acknowledge what has become clear as rankings show California near the bottom of states nationwide in distributing vaccines: The existing system is not working.
“We’re building a statewide vaccine administration network,” said Yolanda Richardson, the secretary of California’s Government Operations Agency, who has been tapped with running the new distribution effort. “This is about California being prepared, to make sure we can get out the vaccine when more supply is available.”
State and local officials have complained for weeks about the insufficient and unreliable supply of vaccines coming from the federal government, which they say has hampered their ability to distribute doses and plan vaccination events.
Biden, who held a conference call with governors on vaccine distribution Tuesday, said he heard that complaint loud and clear. He promised the federal government would allocate a minimum of 10.1 million doses to states next week, up from 8.6 million this week. He also pledged to provide three-week forecasts, showing states how much vaccine they can expect to receive, to improve planning.
“This is unacceptable,” Biden said of the vaccine shortages. “Lives are at stake.”
Looking farther out, Biden said the federal government has bought an additional 100 million doses each from manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna that would be delivered this summer.
State data shows California has vaccinated 2.6 million people and is administering 125,000 doses per weekday.
But residents who have tried to get a vaccine have often been bewildered by a complex distribution system split up among California’s 58 counties and their local public health departments, plus health care plans, community clinics, pharmacies and others.
Rules for vaccine distribution have varied from county to county, adding to the confusion. Santa Clara County, for instance, announced Tuesday that it is expanding eligibility to people 65 and older, well after some other Bay Area counties had taken that step.
“Right now, we don’t have one California implementation” of the vaccine, said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a consumer advocacy group. “We have literally dozens and hundreds of implementations.”
Until now, California has been relying on the system it has long used to distribute flu shots, Wright said, which has not been able to match the scale and logistical challenges of COVID vaccines.
“This is a significantly more complex and urgent undertaking,” he sad.
The plan California leaders rolled out this week aims to solve those problems on several fronts — but many crucial details remained unclear Tuesday.
The new vaccine team is charged with developing a network of vaccine providers, with a mix of fixed and “pop-up” inoculation sites, directing more doses to those providers who have shown they’re doing an efficient job of getting shots into arms. The state’s plans call for creating a “Third Party Administrator” knowledgeable in health care delivery and logistics to manage the process — though that person has not yet been named and Richardson said the scope of their work was still being determined.
The state is also rolling out a new website, MyTurn.ca.gov, to notify people when they are eligible to receive the vaccine and schedule an appointment for their shot once they are. The site is meant to improve what has at times been unreliable data on vaccine distribution.
And, hoping to simplify how California is prioritizing doses, Newsom announced Monday that the state will eventually shift to using age, rather than occupation, to determine someone’s place in the vaccine line.
People who were already at the front of that line — health care workers, farm and grocery workers, first responders and teachers, along with seniors 65 and older — will continue to be the top priority.
But once those groups have gotten their shots, the state will no longer prioritize workers in other front-line industries for the next rounds of doses. That decision quickly drew backlash from labor unions and industry groups, who have been lobbying the state to prioritize public-facing workers such as bus drivers, veterinarians and prison guards, among a long list of other occupations.“California labeled these workers essential when the state wanted their service through the pandemic,” SEIU California President Bob Schoonover said in a statement. “If they are removed from the priority list for vaccination, the state is now saying they are expendable.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
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Coronavirus: State takes control of California’s sluggish vaccine roll-out as Biden boosts federal supply - East Bay Times
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