State officials are promising to consider the concerns of Bay Area legislators who say many of the region’s hardest-hit communities were unfairly excluded from a plan to dedicate more of California’s limited supply of coronavirus vaccine to the state’s most vulnerable residents.
In a call Monday, the lawmakers urged Gov. Newsom’s office to rethink the plan that was announced last week to bolster the share of vaccine for underserved communities.
State Sen. Dave Cortese, Morgan Hill Mayor Rich Constantine and others from across the region say the state’s plan to reserve about 40% of its vaccine supply for hard-hit residents in 446 ZIP codes leaves out equally at-risk residents across the Bay Area. The plan — which employs an evaluation of income, education levels and other factors devised for a program called the Healthy Places Index — included just 10 Bay Area ZIP codes, omitting virus-ravaged neighborhoods in East San Jose, North Central San Mateo and elsewhere.
“To me, it means life and death for people,” said Cortese, a San Jose Democrat.
The discussions come as a number of counties are increasingly voicing displeasure with the state’s arrangement with Blue Shield to oversee vaccine distribution throughout California moving forward. On Monday, County Executive Jeff Smith said Santa Clara County would not sign a contract to hand the reins to Blue Shield and that not a single county in the state was planning to do so.
“I think everyone sees it as a solution looking for a problem,” Smith said. “We’re talking about adding bureaucracies rather than vaccinating people. There’s nothing that Blue Shield brings to the table that increases anyone’s likelihood to get the vaccine.”
The new concerns are another example of the ever-shifting nature of the vaccine rollout and a sign of the widespread confusion over distribution of the limited supply as the state struggles to achieve some level of equity when it comes to which residents have access to the coveted shots.
Cortese and other officials abruptly canceled a news conference Monday morning and instead pleaded their case directly to the governor’s office. During a hastily scheduled conversation with state officials, Cortese said, the Bay Area officials said the state’s use of the HPI index obscured some very needy neighborhoods that share ZIP codes with healthier, more affluent communities. To fix the issue, Cortese said participants on the call offered a number of suggestions, including incorporating other county-level data on where the virus has struck the hardest.
For example, about one in 10 residents of the 95127 ZIP code in East San Jose, which includes Alum Rock, a largely Latino neighborhood with lots of essential workers who don’t have the luxury of staying home, have had the coronavirus. But it’s not on the state’s priority list, while Treasure Island, with a case rate of less than half East San Jose’s, is on the list. The 95127 ZIP code also includes the wealthy foothills around the San Jose Country Club, which skews how the state ranked the area.
Cortese and Constantine said state officials requested 24 hours to study their beef but seem open to making changes to the formula. State officials did not respond Monday to a request for comment.
In Morgan Hill, for instance, the city only has one ZIP code but multiple neighborhoods with varying levels of infection. Solely looking at the city’s ZIP code does not accurately capture certain areas of Morgan Hill that have been hardest hit by the pandemic, particularly areas where people of color and farmworkers are concentrated, Constantine said Monday.
“The current system just doesn’t work,” Constantine said.
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, who was not on the call with the other Bay Area elected leaders but shares some of their concerns, said Monday he had also spoken to Mark Ghaly, the state’s top health official, and officials in the governor’s office and that they were running models to look at better ways of identifying those most in need.
“I expect we’re going to see something in the next couple of days,” Liccardo said.
It’s unclear what, if anything, California officials will decide in the next 24 hours, and exactly how they might reconfigure the distribution system remains unknown, but Constantine said he’s optimistic.
“I’m pleasantly surprised that the state has actually listened and that they seem to want to actually work with us,” Constantine said. “I have no doubt that the state understands our concerns and wants to make sure the vaccines are distributed in the most equitable way possible.”
Cortese agreed.
“They’re receptive,” the senator said, adding that Ghaly has been involved in the conversations.
Cortese said the Bay Area leaders agreed with the state that equitable vaccine distribution should be a priority, and they are not fighting the state’s latest effort to direct 40% of the state’s vaccine supply to its hardest-hit communities. But they want counties to have more control when it comes to targeting needy areas with vaccine.
When asked whether it made sense to change the formula to benefit the Bay Area in a way that could ultimately punish other hard-hit areas in the Central Valley and Southern California, Cortese said any changes would likely not be dramatic, but he would want the county to have more say over where vaccine lands.
“It’s just got everybody really upset,” he said. “I hope they come back with a fix pretty quick because I’m afraid that sort of anger is going to continue to foment out there and rightly so.”
Assemblymember Phil Ting, who represents Daly City and parts of San Francisco, said Bay Area leaders are advocating for the addition of more communities in the Bay Area but not to take away those that are already on the list.
“This is not a competition of which communities have gotten hit the hardest,” he said. “This is really about acknowledging that some communities that have been hit harder than others are missing and that they should also be prioritized.”
Liccardo is hopeful that supply constraints will ease in the coming weeks and that the conversation will shift.
“I would like to believe that four or five weeks from now, based on all the data and information from the White House, we’ll be in a place where we won’t be fighting over vaccine allocation,” he said, “and instead focused on ensuring that we overcome the hesitancy and other barriers that exist in our communities to vaccination.”
Harriet Blair Rowan contributed reporting.
