Frustration and anger mount in Northern California as COVID vaccine supplies dwindle

Frustrated Northern California residents are spending hours on hold only to learn vaccines for the coronavirus are unavailable. Others complain they don’t even know who to call about getting the COVID-19 vaccine. Local health officials, meanwhile, report they aren’t getting enough doses to make good on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s promises of more vaccines this week.

And, as of Friday, some Sacramento-area officials say supplies have dwindled to a precious few hundred vials.

One month after a hyped December launch, the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Sacramento and Northern California is now creating confusion and anger amid mixed messages — with no certainty that the path forward will get smoother any time soon.

Stan Rosenstein, 69 and a retiree who lives in Davis, is among those who feel let down. As soon as he heard Newsom’s announcement Wednesday that people his age — 65 and up — now qualify for inoculation, he went onto Sutter Health’s website, where he spent hours and got nowhere.

“I was really excited,” he said. But “when I got through, they were saying it will be weeks if not months before you get access to the vaccine. They are overwhelmed. This is tragic.”

Local county health officials report they are getting smaller shipments now than they had hoped for, and they are struggling to plan for the upcoming weeks because they aren’t being told until the last minute how many doses they will be getting in their next shipment.

“We’re running out,” Yolo County spokeswoman Jenny Tan said on Friday. “We have a total of 5,350 first doses, of which we’ve used at least 4,300. Those remaining doses are already reserved for use.”

In Sacramento County, health department officials say they expect to receive only 975 new doses in their shipment next week, far lower than they had been getting in previous weekly shipments. The county got 15,000 does in a shipment on Jan. 4, and 2,300 doses on Dec. 28.

Sacramento County officials say they have issued a special request to the state for more doses for next week, but had not yet heard back as of noon Friday.

Those numbers do not include an estimate 43,000-plus doses that have gone directly to health care providers in Sacramento County, such as Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, Dignity Health and UC Davis Medical Center.

Those health care providers also say they are not getting the doses they need.

UC Davis Medical Center, which already has inoculated 12,000 of its 14,000 employees, started giving shots this week to patient members who are 75 and older. But they need far more doses to get through the 23,000 patients age 75 and up, they say.

So, for the moment, they are focusing on a few hundred who are at highest risk, said Dr. J. Douglas Kirk, chief medical officer for UC Davis said his system.

“We are going to move from 75 to 65 to 55, but really that is all predicated on amply supply of vaccine,” Kirk said. “We have enough to do the (500 high-risk) patients we have identified. But we will need tens of thousands of doses on a regular basis to be able to keep up.”

Not only have federal government and manufacturers not been able to produce and distribute the number of doses officials were predicting in December, the news got worse on Friday, when the Washington Post reported that the federal government does not have readily available stores of vaccines that it had said earlier this week it planned to send out to states.

President-elect Joe Biden in a speech called the federal vaccine rollout so far “a dismal failure,” and promised in a follow-up tweet that his administration “will move heaven and earth to ... increase vaccine supply and get it out the door as soon as possible.”

Faced with lack of vaccines, Sacramento’s health chief Dr. Olivia Kasirye put out a statement this week warning that Sacramento County is not yet in position to dispense vaccinations to people who are 65 and up.

“We request patience as we work to navigate the rapidly changing landscape of vaccination best practices and availability,” Kasirye said. “We are working closely with health care providers, front-line employers and dozens of other public and private entities to ensure that anyone eligible and interested in the vaccine can receive it as soon as possible.

“We are closer than ever to COVID-19 immunizations for everyone who wants them, but we are not there yet.”

Sacramento County health officials said they will use the remainder of their doses next week to focus vaccines for the initial targeted group, which is health care providers and people living in skilled nursing facilities, deemed to be among the most vulnerable people.

Some of those doses will be administered at a Cal Expo vaccination site, which is being running by the county health department and supported by the National Guard.

Seeking to speed up vaccinations, Newsom announced that Cal Expo was being turned into a mass vaccination site. Those comments were premature. The site is open, but by invitation and appointment only for front-line health workers who have not been able to get vaccinations through the private health care system.

County officials say they intend for Cal Expo to become a mass vaccination site, but do not know when that will be.

Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California, said the governor’s new guidelines opening vaccines to the 65+ group puts local officials in a difficult situation.

“Expanding the list of who is eligible for the vaccine does not get us more doses,” she wrote. “It does not get us more vaccinators, or any of the other resources we need to effectively run our operations.

“In order to increase the number of people vaccinated, we need increased resources from the state including funding and personnel. We also need our vaccine allocation to be reliable and predictable.”

Health officials locally say they remain hopeful that the early hiccups in the vaccine roll out will get smoothed out, and that the federal government and manufacturers will be able to step up the pace.

Sacramento-area health care providers contacted say they remain focused for now on the oldest and highest-risk patients. Sutter Health announced it had begun on Thursday inoculating patients 75 and up, along with community health workers. Sutter did not say when it expects to be able to expand to people in lower age groups.

But, while many people interviewed by The Bee say they are willing to wait their turn, they say they are frustrated as much by the lack of detailed information as anything.

Caryl Myers, who is 74 and retired, said her doctors have told her they are in the dark about how the vaccine program will unfold. “My doctor is a member of a very large group of doctors in Sacramento, but he has no information yet! Who is in charge of the organizing of this?”

William Sanders, 84, a retired CHP assistant chief in Gold River, called his doctor three times, but couldn’t get an appointment. But someone else he knows got one right away.

Vaccinations continue to be administered on a daily basis in health clinics around the region, leading to emotional and hopeful moments for some families.

Jim Clark, 86, was among the lucky ones. UC Davis contacted him and asked him to come in this week for his shot. He was thrilled.

“I’m very happy to get this shot. I’d like to live a couple more years.”

It took Granite Bay resident David Sanders, 75, almost a day and a half but he finally secured a vaccine for him and his wife — two weeks from now, at a Sutter Health facility in Concord.

Sanders spent most of Thursday trying to secure an appointment with Sutter, but the health system’s toll-free hotline was overwhelmed and blocking calls, and its online portal crashed.

He ultimately secured appointments online Friday morning, though there were essentially no slots available at Sacramento-based facilities.

“The website needs some work and it needs more capacity,” Sanders said. “And the 800-number is just useless, you can’t talk to a real person there about anything.”