Los Angeles County’s vaccine supply is growing — just as it may lose a large-scale vaccination site.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services announced Friday, March 26, that next month they will stop running the inoculation clinic at Cal State Los Angeles, which they have jointly managed since February.
Officials, though, are scrambling to prevent its closure, which is set for April 11.
Paul Simon, chief science officer for LA County’s Department of Public Health, said in an afternoon briefing that the county is in discussions with other agencies to keep the site up and running.
“While we are disappointed, we understand,” he said, “and there are plans underway to figure out the best way to preserve that” site.
The clinic, though, was never intended to be there for long. It launched as an eight-week pilot project, and officials said that the site’s success is clear — more than 200,000 vaccine doses administered there so far.
“The Biden-Harris administration gave us funding and vaccines for those eight weeks,” Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokeswoman for the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said by phone Friday, “and I think we’ve done some good work.”
Simon, with the county, said officials are discussing multiple possibilities for the site’s future. It could remain as one large-scale clinic, or it could be broken into smaller sites. The county itself could be the lead agency behind it, as could the City of Los Angeles, he said. And officials are also discussing “other possibilities” for who could run it, Simon added, though he did not elaborate on what those possibilities might be.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office is a part of those discussions.
“We are in conversations with county, state and federal authorities on how to maintain vaccination operations in this community,” Andrea Garcia, a Garcetti spokeswoman, said in an email. “Whatever the outcome, we hope that the federal government continues to support direct FEMA vaccine allocation to this site.”
Simon, meanwhile, said the county hopes to finalize and announce plans for the site’s continued operation before April 11.
“We recognize it’s a really important site,” he said. “We in no way want to scale back vaccination infrastructure. We’re fairly confident we’re going to be getting increased supplies of vaccines, so we want to be well prepared to deliver it swiftly.”
The county, in fact, is expected to receive 340,000 vaccine doses next week, a 21% jump from the doses received this week. The allocation will represent the largest single-week increase so far.
The increased supply from the state was a major factor in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement on Thursday that all Californians ages 50 and up will be eligible for inoculation April 1, and everyone ages 16 and up can be vaccinated April 15.
The county health department has heard from “multiple high level sources,” Simon said, that the supply will increase even more in April. He has not, however, seen any hard numbers on what that uptick will look like.
“I’m reticent to really even try to make an educated guess,” he said. “I would leave it at, I think, some confidence — optimism at the least, confidence at the most — that we will receive a significant increase in vaccination supplies over the next month.”
Still, he said, whatever that increase looks like, demand around the April 1 and April 15 dates will likely remain far higher than the supply — at least at first.
“While we’re very happy about this expansion, we want people to, again, try to be patient,” Simon said. “Not everybody who wants a vaccine who is newly eligible will be able to get it that first week. You may want to wait a week or two” before trying to book an appointment.
“I anticipate we will be overwhelmed, probably, during the first week when things open up,” he added, “but I hope that beyond that, things will quiet down a bit.”
The news about the increased supply came as LA County also shared on Friday that 39 more people have died from coronavirus-related causes, bringing the county’s death toll to 23,055.
The county also reported 859 new coronavirus cases, but more than 200 of those were associated with backlogged lab reports. There have been 1,217,034 cases identified in LA County since the pandemic began.
Those numbers, though, don’t include updated numbers from Long Beach and Pasadena, which both operate their own health departments.
Long Beach reported one more death on Friday, pushing its death toll to 908, and 74 more cases, bringing that total to 51,976. Pasadena reported eight new cases, but no new deaths. So far, that city has confirmed 11,121 cases since the pandemic began and 335 deaths.
In LA County, 692 people were being treated in hospitals for the coronavirus on Friday, and 26% of them were in intensive-care units; it was the first time daily hospitalizations dropped under 700 since October.
While the future of the Cal State LA site remains unclear, the clinic’s current operators are wrapping up the process of giving second doses of the Pfizer vaccine to people who had already received their initial doses. Beginning April 1, the site will administer only the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Appointment slots for those doses will be released daily beginning April 1 through the state’s MyTurn web portal, or by calling 833-422-4255.
City News Service contributed to this report.