Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Friday, March 5, and I’m writing from Los Angeles.
“An old adage says, ‘Continue to do what you’ve done, you’ll get what you got,’” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said during a press briefing Thursday in Stockton.
The reference came after the governor had recounted some of the state’s efforts to lower the barriers for vaccine access in areas that have felt a disproportionate share of the pandemic’s pain, while also bluntly acknowledging that the state was still “falling short” on the issue. Those disparities in vaccine access have fallen “disproportionately on the Latino community in the state of California,” Newsom said.
The state could continue making small tweaks and improvements to the existing system, but that wouldn’t be enough to bring real and demonstrable progress, the governor said.
As announced late Wednesday night and explained for the first time in detail on Thursday, the state will once again be shifting gears in its pandemic response — this time to dramatically change the way vaccines are allocated.
Officials announced that the state will now devote 40% of available COVID-19 vaccines to residents in the most disadvantaged areas. As my colleagues Luke Money, Soumya Karlamangla and Ron Lin explain in their story, it’s a move aimed not only at addressing the stubborn inequities that have dogged the state’s vaccine rollout, but also at accelerating its reopening.
[Read the story: “California thinks it can stop COVID by flooding poor areas with vaccine. Will it work?” in the Los Angeles Times]
The new strategy won’t change who is currently eligible for vaccines, but rather who will be prioritized within the very large group of Californians in the currently eligible tiers.
The newly announced dedicated 40% allocation will flow toward communities within the lowest quartile of the California Healthy Places Index, a measure of socioeconomic opportunity that takes into account economic, social, education, housing and transportation factors. That lowest quartile encompasses roughly 400 ZIP Codes sprinkled throughout the state, with many in the Central Valley and in and around Los Angeles County and the Bay Area. It has been home to roughly 40% of the state’s COVID-19 cases and deaths, but only about 17% of vaccines have been administered there.
The strategy comes with inherent tradeoffs, as my colleagues report. Reserving a significant slice of the state’s supply means that fewer doses will be available for other groups, at least in the near term. The previously announced dedicated share for educators — 10% of California’s weekly allotment — will also remain in place, meaning half of the state’s doses will be spoken for right from the outset. But officials are also hoping for major boosts in vaccine supply in the coming weeks.
The new effort will directly tie equitable vaccine distribution to further reopenings: Once 2 million doses have been administered in the targeted communities, the state will relax the threshold for counties to advance from the most restrictive category of the state’s four-tier, color-coded reopening plan.
More effectively distributing vaccines in the neediest areas will “give our entire state greater confidence that we’ve protected against the most significant levels of disease transmission in communities that have been, throughout this pandemic, the hardest hit,” California Health Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said Thursday.
Questions still remain about exactly how this will work on the ground, particularly because the state’s existing vaccine equity efforts have been dogged by logistical issues. A program intended to provide special appointment access codes to those in the hardest-hit communities was widely misused, with many affluent Californians who would not have otherwise been eligible for vaccination able to secure appointments through the system. Newsom said the state has since transitioned to using individual-use access codes, rather than easily shareable group codes.
“It’s whack-a-mole, every single day,” Newsom said of efforts to ensure that outsiders don’t take advantage of vaccine access programs for the most underserved Californians.
“It’s imperfect,” the governor said.
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