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California will soon expand its list of people eligible for coronavirus vaccination from an additional 4 million to 6 million people by adding people with severe disabilities and those with health conditions that put them at high risk of infection and death, Secretary of State for Health Dr Mark Ghaly said on Friday. .
Among those who will become eligible on March 15 are people with certain cancers, heart, lung and kidney disease, as well as pregnant women, people with Down syndrome, organ transplant recipients and those who are severely obese. They join people 65 and over and those whose high-risk job descriptions were already eligible for the state plan.
California has been plagued by vaccine shortages and Ghaly couldn’t say how long it will take the state to vaccinate the roughly 17-19 million people who will be eligible for the vaccine once the new additions are made.
“Without that crystal ball on the allowance, it will be very difficult to respond,” he said. The country’s most populous state can expect to receive more than a million doses every week at least for the next few weeks, Ghaly said.
Each of the current vaccines – Pfizer and Moderna – requires two doses for full effectiveness. It takes 1 million shots to cover 500,000 people.
Judy Mark, the president of Disability Voices United, thanked the state for increasing vaccinations for people with disabilities, but said it should be immediate.
“The effective date of March 15 may be too late for many people with disabilities who could die from COVID in the meantime,” she said in a statement.
Ghaly said the extra time was needed for the state to increase capacity. Some people with disabilities or certain health conditions will be more difficult to reach because they need to be vaccinated at home, he said.
Governor Gavin Newsom said the state recognizes that people with certain physical and intellectual disabilities are “particularly vulnerable.”
“I want the disability community to know, we’ve heard you, and we’re going to do more and better to provide access, even with scarcity,” he said during a visit to a site from mass vaccination in San Francisco.
California is coming out of its worst stage of the pandemic. New virus cases and hospitalizations have dropped dramatically in the past three weeks, and deaths that exceeded 3,500 per week have also started to decline, albeit more slowly.
The state began its vaccine rollout in December as cases and hospitalizations skyrocketed. Officials initially focused on vaccinating people based on the level of risk associated with their work. Healthcare workers were the first in line, and the state later added educators, agricultural workers, and emergency service workers. People in long-term care facilities and people 65 years of age and over are also eligible.
Once the state has passed through these groups, it plans to move to a system based on age rather than a job description. The state has not fully developed a plan for age-based criteria.
“We are working to determine what that age group will be and when that date will be triggered. He will be driven largely by the vaccine supply, ”Ghaly said.
The state decided to add people with disabilities and health concerns of all ages after receiving criticism that it was not protecting those at higher risk of infection and death from COVID-19.
Still, California surgeon general Dr Nadine Burke Harris said doctors will need to use their best judgment and not allow everyone to get the shot.
“It’s really crucial that suppliers exercise a fair amount of recognition of the scarcity of supply to ensure that those who are most at risk can get access to the vaccine,” she told KGO- Friday. TV.
It won’t be easy for doctors, said Dr Louise Aronson, professor of geriatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.
“It’s going to be tough for the patients and it’s going to be tough for the clinicians, but the way we do it is for all of us to prioritize the highest risk and stay a little more patient longer,” which is one of the most difficult requests. at this point in history, ”she said.
California has opened many mass vaccination centers in recent weeks, but they are not operating at full capacity due to vaccine shortages. The city of Los Angeles has temporarily closed vaccination sites at Dodger Stadium and four other sites until supplies can be restocked.
“We’re all frustrated. We know there is a lot more we could do if we had doses available,” said Dr. Paul Simon, LA County Scientific Director. He said the county could administer about 600,000 doses per week, but was receiving about 200,000.
California has administered 5.5 million doses to date, and more than one million people have received both.
Also on Friday, the state released data showing the age, race, gender and county of people who have been vaccinated. It only covers healthcare workers, long-term care residents, and people 65 and older, which means it doesn’t accurately reflect the entire California population, officials said. State.
The incomplete data is just one piece of information that officials rely on in an attempt to distribute vaccines to California’s most vulnerable people. The state has not released a vaccine breakdown by zip code, which can be used to measure whether inner city residents get vaccinated, but it has provided a demographic breakdown of vaccinations by county.
Data shows that almost a third of vaccines went to whites, almost 16% to Latinos, over 13% to Asian Americans, and less than 3% to blacks. Of the rest, 14% went to people identified as multiracial, 12% to those listed as “other” and the rest to “unknown”. The state relies on self-identification or on data from health providers.
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Associated Press writers Janie Har in San Francisco and Amy Taxin in Orange County contributed.
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