Although only a fraction of residents age 65 and over have received a COVID-19 vaccine and supplies of the medication remain woefully low, Los Angeles County will expand vaccinations to an array of essential workers in two to three weeks, including teachers, the public health director announced.
The move follows a call by the governor in late January for shots to be offered to workers in three categories: education/child care; food and agriculture; and emergency services and law enforcement.
In Los Angeles County, those categories represent roughly 1.3 million people, meaning that even after they become eligible for the shots, it will take weeks to get all of them fully vaccinated, which requires two doses spaced out by three to four weeks.
The expansion of the vaccine eligibility will occur even as the county continues administering shots to the currently eligible populations—health care workers, residents and staff of nursing and long-term care facilities and residents 65 and over. Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer noted that, to date, only 20 percent of residents age 65 and over have received at least one dose of the medication.
The county on average has been receiving only about 200,000 doses of the medication a week. With vaccine supply remaining that low and the field of eligible residents expanding, getting an appointment for a shot could become dramatically more difficult.
“We’re trying to follow along with what’s happening across the state,” Ferrer said. “… In some counties, smaller counties or smaller cities, they’ve been able already to start vaccinating in those sectors, and they also have not completed vaccinations for all of their folks who are 65 and older.
“At this point, we’d like to make significant inroads into getting people who are older vaccinated,” she said. “… Our hope is that over these next two weeks you’re going to see that number go way up in terms of the number of older people who are getting vaccinated. But also it’s an acknowledgement that we do have to get started with some of our essential workers. It’s gonna be really difficult to wait weeks and weeks and weeks until we complete an entire sector before we move on.”
Representatives from an array of sectors have been pressuring state and local officials to make the vaccines available, creating what Ferrer conceded was a difficult process of deciding who will come first. The issue of getting teachers vaccinated has become a major issue in recent days amid pushes by Gov. Gavin Newsom and some local officials to get students back in classrooms. But Los Angeles Unified teachers and the superintendent have said teachers and staff need to be vaccinated before that can happen, despite the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying otherwise.
Ferrer pointed out Wednesday that 1,700 schools opened last fall in the county with limited numbers of students, and another 300 are operating under a waiver program that allowed younger students to return to campuses, and “we saw very few outbreaks” of the virus, and those that did occur were small and easily contained.
She also said the county is taking steps to address disparities in the distribution of vaccines overall, with statistics released this week showing that of the more than 1 million doses administered so far, only 3.5 percent went to Black residents.
