A group of Bay Area elected officials are calling on the state to change it’s recently announced COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan aimed at focusing on California’s hardest-hit areas, complaining that the region has been largely left out.
The state’s new plan is using the Healthy Places Index, a tool to measure economic and other community conditions that affect health outcomes, to determine ZIP codes that will receive twice the allotment of vaccines compared to the rest of the state. An analysis by the San Francisco Chronicle published Friday found the Bay Area makes up just 2% of the areas included in the equitable vaccine initiative, even though the region has many communities with infection rates twice the state average.
“This is a matter of life and death for our community,” state Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, said in a statement Sunday. “This plan needs to be restructured and recalibrated immediately to ensure a fair and equitable vaccine rollout that truly protects our most vulnerable.”
Five Bay Area counties, including Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Sonoma and Napa, were excluded from the new plan altogether. Several communities in other counties with higher rates of coronavirus infections, like San Francisco’s Mission District and East Palo Alto, were also left off the list.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, says the state’s ZIP code-based formula for vaccine distribution doesn’t take into account the Bay Area’s unique mix of demographics.
“When you have statewide formulas to identify communities that are disadvantaged in some way, the Bay Area doesn't get captured as well as other parts of the state,” Wiener said. “We have neighborhoods that tend to have both poor people and wealthy people in them, and so sometimes Bay Area low-income communities get screened out.”
Wiener says the formula needs to be refined to make sure it’s capturing the region’s hard-hit areas.
A spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health said in an email that the state’s new vaccine formula will “more equitably provide vaccines,” and that “the state continues to work closely with all counties and elected officials to ensure that the vaccine supply they receive targets those communities most hard-hit in counties.”
A media event organized by Cortese’s office, which included Wiener and other lawmakers representing the Bay Area, was called off Monday. Cortese and Wiener say they are in ongoing talks with the governor’s office to advocate for Bay Area communities.
“We just want to make sure that the Bay Area’s most impacted communities are also fully included,” Wiener said. “And I'm optimistic that's going to happen.”