Faced with lingering shortages of the coronavirus vaccine, Sonoma County canceled vaccinations next week for people who had signed up to get their first shots and shut down clinics scheduled to immunize teachers and others who work with children.
Instead, the county will reserve its inadequate supply of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines to prioritize second doses for people who received their first shot earlier this month, a vital step that boosts immunity to the virus to roughly 95%.
The erasure of the planned clinics at Rancho Cotate High School in Rohnert Park, which were organized in conjunction with the Sonoma County Office of Education, threatens to reset the clock on the long-delayed return to school for most students in the county.
“It’s very frustrating,” said Dr. Urmila Shende, the county’s vaccine chief. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
While the county has the infrastructure to deliver upward of 40,000 doses a week, it expects to receive only enough vaccine to administer 7,680 doses next week, roughly the same it got this week but a bit less than the 8,025 doses it received last week, Shende said.
Vaccine supplies could begin to swell next week if federal regulators approve the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which requires only a single shot to be effective. The Biden administration has told California it can expect to receive 380,000 Johnson & Johnson vaccines next week and Gov. Gavin Newsom said he expects the same amount each week for three weeks.
Distribution of the J&J vaccine still is contingent upon federal Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention action, though Newsom said he is confident of the quick approval and availability.
The state, which is currently administering about 1.4 million shots a week due to constrained supplies, announced it would have the capacity to administer 3 million doses a week starting Monday.
Starting Monday, the county-by-county system used to determine eligibility for the vaccine will be replaced with a single statewide standard, the state Department of Health Services announced. All health care providers and local health jurisdictions will move to a uniform, state-directed eligibility criteria, eliminating confusion on who is eligible to receive the vaccine.
Confusion over eligibility has plagued the vaccination campaign in Sonoma County, leading to the cancellation of thousands of appointments in late January scheduled by people who qualified under the state standard but did not meet county guidelines.
But the biggest problem today is the supply of vaccine, which simply isn’t meeting public demand for immunizations or even the county’s capacity to deliver shots.
Last week, the national vaccine supply chain was disrupted by severe winter storms blanketing much of the country. Sonoma County health officials confirmed that is no longer an issue. Yet the county’s allocation from the state is stagnant at best lately. And the same is true of other counties, county vaccine site coordinator Ken Tasseff said.
Asked why the allocations are moving backward, Sonoma County Supervisor Lynda Hopkins said, “I think we really need to ask that question of the state of California.”
Representatives of the California Department of Public Health did not respond to a request for comment Friday afternoon.
Frustrated with the county’s dwindling supply of doses, Hopkins wondered aloud if the county had been diminished by Blue Shield, which has been hired by the state as the third-party administrator, or TPA, overseeing its new centralized vaccination appointment and delivery system. Blue Shield is expanding the system in three waves, initially focusing on 10 counties in Central and Southern California. Sonoma and Lake counties are in the second wave of 28 counties that will start transitioning to the new network on Monday, while Marin, Napa and Mendocino counties are in the third wave that will begin merging into the system March 7.
“For a while, we were on a very hopeful trajectory,” Hopkins said. “Then the TPA process began at the state level, the first wave rolled out, it became very clear there was a large focus on those first-wave TPA counties and suddenly our supply was either flat or declining.”
As the Blue Shield program expands, MyTurn.ca.gov will become the main source for Californians to sign up for appointments. Sonoma County residents can currently register to be notified when they become eligible or when appointments open up.
For now, Tasseff said the flow of vaccine is so tight that the county is able to fulfill its existing second-dose appointments only because Kaiser Permanente is “helping us out” with 250 doses.