Coronavirus vaccine coming to Fresno County. But it may be months before you get a shot
Fresno County expects to receive its first shipment of a coveted vaccine against COVID-19 by the middle of December, a long-awaited development to help end the coronavirus pandemic.
But at fewer than 8,000 doses, the first shipment of the vaccine from pharmaceutical company Pfizer is a far cry from the 100,000 doses that local officials had hoped for as recently as a few weeks ago to jump-start large-scale inoculation of the broader population against the virus.
“The first initial allocation that Fresno County will receive will be 7,800 doses of Pfizer vaccine,” said Joe Prado, community health division manager for the Fresno County Department of Public Health. And all of those doses — the first of two individual shots needed to provide protection against COVID-19 — will be directed to “high risk, frontline health care workers in the hospital settings,” Prado said.
Prado, who is heading up the county’s efforts to coordinate vaccine distribution, said federal and state reviews and approvals of the first vaccine may come by about Dec. 10. “Our expectation is, if all of the federal and state approvals come in line, we’ll actually take receipt of vaccine shortly after Dec. 15,” he said.
But that first batch of doses are only a drop in the bucket compared with the number of workers in health care in Fresno County. “We estimate that we have over 58,000 health care workers in Fresno County alone, so this is just the first wave of vaccine that is coming into our area,” said Prado.
When can public get COVID vaccine?
Vaccines likely won’t be available to the broader public until the spring or summer of 2021, Prado said.
The targeted hospital-care group for the initial round of vaccinations will include not only doctors and nurses, Prado said, but hospital support staff who also are at risk for exposure to the coronavirus. “It’s the sanitation workers, it’s the people delivering food into the rooms,” he said. “It’s a multitude of individuals that actually meet that criteria of ‘frontline,’ so there is a true equity lens being developed in the allocation tables at the national, state and local level.”
Dr. Rais Vohra, Fresno County’s interim health officer, and Prado said the state has told counties that an additional shipment of vaccine will be coming later in December. “If we follow the targeted workforce of healthcare workers, it could be anywhere in the range to 40,000 by late December, could be in upper areas of that,” Prado said.
Vohra said he is hopeful that would start to help workers in skilled nursing facilities that are also among the prioritized groups for the early rounds of vaccines.
Pfizer, Moderna coronavirus vaccines require two doses
The COVID-19 vaccines leading the way in the approval process — one by Pfizer, the other by Moderna Therapeutics — both require two separate shots to provide protection from the virus. Once the county receives the shipments and doses are distributed to hospitals, Vohra said, they will administer the shots to workers, and then a second shot 21 days later. For the Moderna vaccine, the second dose comes 28 days after the first shot.
The first 7,800 doses will all go toward providing the first shot for hospital workers, with the federal government pledging to provide the second doses within the 21-day time frame, county officials said.
Prado and Vohra said the lower-than-expected number of doses may benefit the county in terms of planning for future distributions of the shots to larger populations.
“We’re going to work out the kinks in the system initially. We do this already with flu vaccine today,” Prado said. “We’re just going to be working through those in this first initial distribution and improve it as we go on.”
Still to be determined is how additional layers of the population will be targeted for vaccines. Prado said the county is engaging with community organizations to gauge local needs and priorities. “It’s just going to focus in on how much vaccine, and then who, as we get into those later tiers,” he said.
“The plan is that higher (numbers of) doses will be coming in 2021, spring and summer, for the general population,” Prado added.
