Fresno pauses some COVID vaccine clinics amid dose shortage. When will they restart?
Fresno County’s mass vaccination site at the Fresno Fairgrounds is being put on hold as health officials cope with a shortage of doses of coronavirus vaccine being allocated by the state of California.
The fairgrounds site, which has operated for several weeks to provide COVID-19 shots for health care workers, and since last week to senior citizens ages 75 and older, had been providing about 1,500 vaccinations a day and filling all of its available online appointments. But Joe Prado, community health division manager for the Fresno County Department of Public Health, said Friday that site won’t be doing vaccinations at all next week.
Another large-scale vaccination site at the Sierra Pacific Orthopedic Center in northeast Fresno is also paused next week, Prado said. “That’s really due to the amount of doses that we have available,” he said. “We want to make sure those doses are available for second doses out there, so we’re taking a break next week.”
The Sierra Pacific site had been vaccinating as many as 1,000 people a day, mostly health care workers.
A third major vaccination site operated by United Health Centers at the Central HIgh School East Campus in northwest Fresno did receive an allocation of doses and will be offering vaccinations, Prado said. “We’re evaluating the amount of resources we have to operate out there,” he said.
Prado and Dr. Rais Vohra, the county’s interim health officer, continued to express frustration at how few doses of the two available vaccines — one produced by Pfizer BioNTech, the other by Moderna — are being authorized for Fresno County by the state Department of Public Health.
Earlier this week, Vohra said he feared that the county would run out of vaccines unless allotments were increased.
Fresno County has built the capacity to give shots to about 30,000 people a week, after ironing the kinks out of the system at the fairgrounds. But the number of vaccine doses coming into the county is far less — about 86,000 doses as of Tuesday, Prado said.
From that number, about 30,000 shots have been administered by the county health department and its partner providers. The rest are already allotted to ensure enough are available to give second doses to people who already have received their first dose, as well as previously scheduled clinics and shots to be given by private medical providers. “Because of our distribution system being built at about 30,000 doses a week, they’re all pretty much accounted for,” Prado said.
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses. For the Pfizer product, the second shot is due three weeks after the first dose, while the second Moderna dose comes after a four-week interval.
Fresno County had requested 38,000 doses from the state this week, but only 8,000 were forthcoming, Prado said.
“Without any indication of us getting a sustainable increased allocation … our modeling has to include that we have to stay at this current level of allocation that varies from 8,000 to 10,000 per week,” Prado said.
Vohra said that Operation Warp Speed, the federal government’s program launched by the Trump administration to distribute vaccines to states, is dependent upon how quickly the drug companies can manufacture the vaccine.
“They’re really allocating week by week, based on what’s being manufactured week by week,” Vohra said. “Every week, Operation Warp Speed tells California, ‘This is your state allocation,’ and then the state turns around and tells the local health jurisdictions … this is your weekly allocation for this week.”
“So we’re just planning week by week (and) that becomes a real nightmare whenever you have a two-dose vaccine system that we’re trying to set up,” Vohra added. “It’s hard to allocate for second doses when you only get a week-by-week snapshot of what we’re going to get.”
“Until the system changes or the allocations change, I’m not sure how we can fix this problem. Ultimately it will be just a matter of getting more vaccine into the supply line,” he said.
Statewide data concerns
Earlier this week, information released by the state indicated that out of six regions in the state, the central and southern San Joaquin Valley —Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced and Tulare counties — have the lowest rate of vaccinations based on population.
Fewer than 18 shots were being administered per 1,000 residents in the seven counties, compared to a statewide average of more than 35 shots per 1,000 residents.
Those figures could be skewed somewhat, however, because California is failing to clearly count and report how many people are receiving vaccines in each of the six regions, The Sacramento Bee learned this week.
Vaccines given by health and hospital systems that operate in more than one county were being counted not in the region where the shots are administered, but where that health system is based. The result is an apparent overcount of vaccine distribution in the Bay Area, in the case of a system like Kaiser Permanente, and an undercount in other parts of the state where Kaiser provides care.
Whatever the data-reporting issues, there is consensus among California counties that there simply isn’t enough vaccine.
Dr. Erica Pan, the state’s leading epidemiologist, said Wednesday it could take until June for enough vaccines to get into the arms of Californians who are age 65 and older unless the amount shipped to the Golden State increases dramatically.
A boost in shot delivery could happen, she said, depending on new vaccines under review and potentially ramped up production of existing ones under President Joe Biden’s administration.
For now it’s a question mark on how to best use what little amount is coming in.
“Where and how can we have the most impact, but also respond to some of the feedback we have in the setting of very little vaccine for a huge state like this?” Pan said Wednesday during a state vaccine planning meeting. “And how can we have consistency across the state? We’ve been hearing a lot about confusion and certain places are moving more quickly than others.”
The dearth of doses is, in some ways, beyond California’s control. States from coast to coast are at the mercy of a limited supply, fragmented distribution and fractured communication about who will get how many doses and when. Plus, confusion abounds about why some officials are calling for all doses to go into arms at once while others — including California — insist on sticking to the plan of ensuring those who get the vaccine have access to both shots.
This story was originally published January 22, 2021 at 6:37 PM.
