County health officer says state not allocating enough COVID-19 vaccine
(Graphic by Solano NewsNet)
Solano County health officials say their counterparts at the California Department of Public Health are not shipping enough COVID-19 vaccine doses locally, and that’s forcing health officials here to temporarily stop scheduling first-dose vaccines.
In a news release sent to reporters on Monday, local health officials said Solano County’s allocation of COVID-19 vaccine doses was the third-lowest out of California’s 58 counties.
“We’ve seen a significant decline in the allocation of vaccine to the County in recent allocations,” Dr. Bela Matyas, Solano County’s public health officer, said in a statement. “The lack of adequate supply has caused us to pause scheduling many first-dose mass-vaccination clinics, drastically slowing our effort to target and vaccinate our most vulnerable populations.”
Local health officials suggested poverty and politics may be to blame, noting that other counties who have received more shipments of the COVID-19 vaccine from state sources “have higher median household incomes.”
County officials used Monterey County as an example, noting that Monterey had nearly 60 percent more allocation of the Modern and Johnson & Johnson variants of the COVID-19 vaccine compared to Solano.
“While Solano County has already administered 134,000 vaccines to date, the new allocations of available doses have dropped by 60 percent,” health officials complained.
In a statement distributed by the Solano County Public Health Office, Supervisor John Vasquez (District 4) pledged to send a letter to the Office of the Governor “urging them to help us secure more vaccine.”
“We want to continue getting these critically needed vaccines in people’s arms,” Vasquez said. “We have the partnerships, infrastructure and demand, we just don’t have the vaccine that we need.”
The statement comes at a time when other counties are experiencing similar shortages.
In Santa Clara County, officials canceled appointments for Kaiser Permanente members last week amid similar complaints of dwindling vaccine shipments. Other Bay Area hospitals, including Sutter Health, have canceled similar appointments for their members.
A parallel situation is also playing out in Los Angeles County, where vaccine shortages have been reported since mid-February, according to local media there.
The complaints of shortages come after California health officials announced they were allocating 40 percent of their available vaccine supply to underserved communities and another 10 percent of their supply to teachers and other educators. It also comes as several counties — including Solano and Contra Costa — recently expanded their eligibility for the vaccine to those aged 50 or older. (Most counties are still limiting eligibility to residents of or over the age of 65, while a few maintain a higher threshold of residents aged 75 or older.)
Last week, California health officials boasted that they broke short-lived state records for the number of people vaccinated, with more than 1 million Californians receiving their first or second dose of the vaccine within a two-day period.
To date, more than 10 million Californians have been partially or fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to state health data reported by the Los Angeles Times. But California still lags far behind other states in terms of the percentage of its population served with a vaccine: Arkansas, Pennsylvania and New Mexico all have higher rates of vaccines administered to their residents compared to California, according to health data.
State health officials say the vaccine shortage is due to a limited supply coming from suppliers — currently, three companies (Pfizer, Modern and Johnson & Johnson) have federal approval to distribute the vaccine in the United States.
California is receiving around 500,000 additional doses of the COVID-19 vaccine from those suppliers each week, according to figures cited by Governor Gavin Newsom at a recent press conference. Officials say they expect supplies to increase drastically as production of the Johnson & Johnson variant of the vaccine starts to ramp up.
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