After less than a year in a quarantine, pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna made international history by quickly developing safe and effective vaccines to combat COVID-19. With the vaccine announced over three months ago, and dispensation starting almost immediately, it has become increasingly difficult to watch California as our vaccine distribution rank has slipped down to 48th place, only using 37% of the vaccines given by the CDC. Distribution ranks are administered by watchdog organizations to monitor how much of the vaccines allocated to a state are administered.
Under the Trump administration, there wasn’t a federal plan for vaccine distribution, much like there wasn’t plans or guidelines for mask-wearing and quarantines. This meant that it was all up to individual states to make plans that they believed would best suit their communities. Florida, a state that was harshly criticized for making seniors wait in overnight lines for vaccines, has managed to distribute enough doses to place 19th, almost 30 states ahead of California. North Dakota, which prioritized the elderly, has distributed over 70% of the vaccines given to their state, allowing it to place 2nd overall.
Biden’s administration has different plans, and has vowed to distribute 100 million vaccines in 100 days. Their strategy is to just release doses when they’re ready, meaning that more people will get their first vaccine, but may need to wait longer to get their second shot. With states like California lagging behind, this could help to speed up distribution.
When the California Health and Human Services Secretary, Mark Ghaly, was asked what was taking so long to distribute doses, he said that the state had “meticulously planned” priority lists and every step of the vaccination process, which had led to the slow-down. Newsom on the other hand seems more focused on people who skip the line (however few that might be), and in an interview with the LA Times said, “we’re just looking for gross negligence: people that are skipping the line that know they shouldn’t be skipping the line”. The governor seems content with remaining blissfully unaware that over 40% of front line workers have turned down the vaccine and that only 2% of his state is vaccinated.
The state epidemiologist, Dr. Erica Pan, confirmed that because of the low distribution rates, the priority vaccination list, which is primarily the elderly and healthcare workers, will most likely not be completed for at least another four months. This in turn, will push back vaccinations for everyone else on vaccine waiting lists including people in prisons or shelters, young adults, and young adults.
Meanwhile, Biden has also announced that he wants to open the majority of K-8 schools to some form of in-person learning within these same 100 days. He plans to do this using a $170 billion boost from the federal government to add virtual learning equipment and improve ventilation.
However, if California’s children won’t be vaccinated until months after June, will it be possible to start the new school year with in-person learning? Biden and Newsom seem to think so, but science contests this. Dr. Anthony Fauci said in December that it will take longer for people under 18 to get vaccinated because there are still trials to be done on children to verify the vaccines’ effectiveness.
If that weren’t a problem in itself, when I took NBC’s interactive “When Could I Get the Vaccine” test, I found that I (and other teenagers without health conditions) am behind almost 21,000,000 people in the state and 800,000 in Sacramento County waiting for a vaccine.
After sharing this information with a few classmates, I was met with a few different responses. One junior said they think we’ll be vaccinated before the next school year but “it depends on how much faith we have in Sacramento”. Another is worried that the state “doesn’t even want to give it to people under 16 because they want to see how it goes with the others”.