COVID vaccine shortfall affects capacity of Fresno clinics. What’s it mean for your shots?
Only a week into its schedule of clinics to offer COVID-19 vaccinations to people ages 75 and older, a shortfall in the number of doses being provided to Fresno County is forcing officials to scale how many people can get the shots each day.
Joe Prado, Fresno County’s community health division manager, said the county will have received about 86,000 doses of vaccines by Wednesday morning. But the pace of shipments of vaccines authorized by the state is not keeping up with either demand from the public or with the capacity of the system the county has put in place to get the shots into people’s arms.
In daily vaccination clinics last week at the Fresno Fairgrounds, Sierra Pacific Orthopedic Center in northeast Fresno, and United Health Centers’ clinics at Central High School in northwest Fresno, about 12,000 people got their shots — mostly healthcare workers and the elderly, said Prado and Dr. Rais Vohra, the county’s interim health officer.
But in a video briefing with reporters Tuesday afternoon, Prado and Vohra expressed concern about the supplies of the vaccine — not only in Fresno County, but across the state and nationwide.
“We’re going to run out of vaccine if our allocation doesn’t increase,” Vohra said Tuesday. “We’re ready for twice or three times the allocation we’re getting.” But, he added, the need and demand for vaccines are statewide, not limited simply to Fresno Count or its neighboring counties.
Prado said Fresno County had based its phased vaccination schedule on an expectation of receiving a combined 30,000 doses each week of the two vaccines that have been approved for emergency use by federal regulators — one by Pfizer-BioNTech, the other by Moderna.
However, the weekly allocations now are coming in from the California Department of Public Health at between 8,000 and 10,000 doses each week. Prado said the Fresno County Department of Public Health requested 20,000 additional doses from the state, but was notified Tuesday that only 5,100 more doses will be forthcoming this week.
“That’s not sufficient for the 30,000-dose distribution system that we’ve built,” Prado said.
The result is that rather than doing up to 1,500 shots per day at the Fresno Fairgrounds, or 1,000 shots daily at Sierra Pacific Orthopedic and Central High School, the county and its partners have to reduce the number of daily appointment slots.
Instead, Prado said, the county is now working to manage its supply of to ensure that enough vaccine is on hand to provide a second dose to people when it’s due —three weeks after the initial shot for the Pfizer product, four weeks for the Moderna medicine. Clinical trials that established that each vaccine is 95% effective in preventing infection and reducing the severity of infection were based on people receiving two shots instead of just one.
“We’re holding the second doses,” Prado said. “We want to make sure the second doses are available, at the provider level and in our (county) freezers.”
COVID vaccination schedule depends on supply
That means a longer wait not only for senior citizens who are considered most at risk for complications from the coronavirus, but a longer wait for people in lower-priority tiers to receive their vaccinations as well.
“We were honestly afraid we were going to run out this week” before the state agreed to provide another 5,100 doses of the Moderna vaccine, Vohra said. “Until the allocation goes up, … we are going to have to dial down our daily count from 3,000 (among the various clinics) to something less so we can do vaccinations every day.”
Prado said the county will be adjusting its vaccination schedule to reflect the number of available vaccines. As of Tuesday, however, the county’s website continues to anticipate providing shots to three different tiers of healthcare workers, including home health and in-home support services workers; workers at dental and health clinics and pharmacies, and laboratories, through at least the end of January.
Senior citizens ages 75 and older are also currently eligible for the vaccines. Some people age 65 and older were receiving shots last week, but Fresno County is trying to limit those recipients in favor of the older people.
More segments of the population were expected to start getting vaccinated in February: workers in food and agriculture, including farm workers; people who work in education and child care; and emergency services personnel including police and firefighters.
The schedule for March includes: homeless people; jail and prison inmates; people who work in transportation and logistics including truck drivers, bus drivers and others; critical manufacturing; and the industrial, commercial and sheltering facilities sectors.
The April phase of vaccinations was expected to include people between the ages of 50 and 64; people ages 16 to 49 who have underlying medical conditions that put them at greater risk for serious illness or death from COVID-19; workers in the water, waste management, defense, energy, chemical and hazardous waste industries; the communication and information technology sectors; financial services; and government operations and community services.
All of those expectations, however, are based on having a steady supply of vaccine coming from the two manufacturers.
At least two other companies are working on vaccines, but their products have not yet been approved for emergency use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and are not available to be ordered.
This story was originally published January 19, 2021 at 4:51 PM.
