One million vaccinations over the next 10 days.
That’s the working goal of one of California’s COVID-19 vaccination planning groups, which convened Wednesday, Jan. 6, and echoed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desire this week to speed up the state’s mass vaccination campaign.
California currently is in the first stage – Phase 1A – of the drive, which sent a first wave of shots to hospitals and pharmacies to inoculate frontline health care workers and long-term care residents.
Phase 1A kicked off in mid-December, but has been slow going as health providers confront the logistical dilemma of redeploying staff to inject other staff in the middle of a winter rush on hospitals. There are also health care workers opting out.
Of about 2 million Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna doses shipped to California so far, roughly 490,000 had been administered as of Tuesday, said Dr. Erica Pan, a California Department of Public Health epidemiologist and co-chair of the Community Vaccine Advisory Committee, which works with the Drafting Guidelines Workgroup to form the state’s coronavirus vaccination agenda.
“We have vaccinated a lot of people… but we do need to move faster,” Pan said. “Our goal is to administer another million in the next 10 days.”
To speed up the first leg of the race, dentists and other medical professionals are being added to the fold of personnel authorized to administer the shots. Local health departments have begun planning large-scale vaccination sites along the lines of coronavirus testing “super sites.”
It remained unclear exactly when public health officials would advise moving on to the next stage, Phase 1B, which is split into two levels.
Tier 1 would go first and includes people age 75 and older and workers at high risk of exposure, such as teachers and workers in childcare, emergency services and food and agriculture.
Second would be Tier 2, which includes people age 65 and older and workers in transportation and logistics, “critical” manufacturing and other sectors, as well as prisoners and homeless people.
Phase 1C would follow, and so far includes people age 50 and older, as well as those up to 49 years old with underlying medical conditions or a disability that could lead to a more severe case of COVID-19. A vaccine has not yet been authorized for children under age 16.
During the committee’s sixth virtual roundtable on Wednesday, talks ranged from how to equitably distribute the shot among more pandemic-vulnerable communities to public service announcement ideas for increasing vaccine acceptance.
“Vaccines don’t save lives, vaccinations save lives, so we’ve got to get them out of the refrigerator – freezer – and into those arms,” said Dr. Oliver Brooks, co-chair of the campaign’s Drafting Guidelines Workgroup.
