Why hasn’t San Francisco opened a mass vaccination site?

When will San Francisco open a mass vaccination site?

San Francisco District 6 Supervisor Matt haney asks this question and pleads for the city to speed up its process of identifying vaccine deployment locations.

“Obviously we should have a mass distribution site in San Francisco, like almost every other great county in the state, and we should have a lot of it,” Haney wrote in an email. “But the biggest concern is that the department does not have a large-scale distribution commitment or plan and fails to deliver the basic levels of communication, transparency and coordination. All of this needs to change immediately.

“My constituents feel completely in the dark with no response from our public health department.”

SF health director Dr Grant Colfax said in a press briefing Tuesday that the city is considering partnering with healthcare providers such as Kaiser and Sutter CMPC to step up distribution by opening centers high-volume vaccination at municipal sites.

“Because the federal and state governments distribute vaccines directly to healthcare providers, these partnerships are absolutely critical to our success as a city,” said Colfax. “COVID Command Center works with healthcare providers to set up large vaccination sites where providers can effectively and efficiently serve their patients.”

Colfax could not provide a location or date for a site to open, but said one of them will be operational when there is sufficient supply to meet the needs of a location designed to serve a large number of people.

“Our goal is to open these sites as quickly as possible when the state provides us with more vaccines. We really need to get more doses and go through the different phases of the state levels in order to achieve the goal of a vaccination site which is to get as many people vaccinated as possible, ”Colfax said, referring the phases of prioritization of vaccines defined by the State. The first group is phase 1a, which includes healthcare workers and residents of skilled nursing facilities, and the city is still completing this phase while moving to phase 1b which includes the elderly.

The vaccination site search is focused on neighborhoods with the most vulnerable communities, and the city will also partner with community groups such as the Latino Task Force and UCSF to offer vaccinations at community sites and clinics. .

Of the city’s 925,000 residents, more than 95% are covered by some form of private or public health insurance: 675,000 have private insurance, 64,000 have Medicare and 179,000 have Medicaid coverage and 179,000 have Medicaid coverage, according to the SF Department of Public Health. .

This leaves a small number of uninsured residents who need immunizations, Colfax said, and the department’s number one priority is to immunize those who are uninsured or underserved by health care entities.

“We are working to ensure that vulnerable populations and those without access to private health care as well as those in the most affected communities are given priority for vaccines,” he said.