In virtual conference on Dec. 14, Sonoma County Health Officer Sundari Mase announced that the first doses of COVID-19 vaccine would be arriving in Sonoma County this week.
The five boxes of the Pfizer vaccine will likely arrive Wednesday, each box containing 975 doses. One box each will be delivered to Kaiser Hospital, Sutter Hospital and Memorial Hospital, with the final two boxes being kept by the county’s health department. The larger hospitals will be distributing vaccine to the smaller hospitals: Healdsburg District Hospital, Sonoma Valley Hospital and Petaluma Valley Hospital.
This is due to the storage requirements for Pfizer’s vaccine, which require -80 degrees Celsius storage. The three larger hospitals and the county office are the only places in the county with that storage ability.
The first set of vaccine recipients, called Tier 1A will be health care workers at the acute care hospitals, according to Dr. Kismet Baldwin, deputy public health officer.
“Most of the doses are going to acute care hospitals but we will have extra doses for our behavioral health and psychiatric hospital staff in this first tier and for paramedics and EMTs and our fire partners within that group,” Baldwin said. “Long term care facilities are in Tier 1, but they won’t receive any from this first shipment.”
Baldwin added that they had chosen to do the initial release this way because acute care hospitals already have the infrastructure in place to vaccinate large numbers of people.
“They do this every year (with the flu vaccine), and we want the first (rollout) to be smooth and get feel for how it works,” she said.
The county is expecting an additional 5,800 doses of the Moderna vaccine, assuming it’s approved this week by the FDA, next week.
However, Mase warns that given the slow rollout of the vaccine and the amount of the population that must be vaccinated in order to achieve good saturation, residents should continue to practice appropriate diligence with their safety measures like masking and social distancing.
“Until the vaccine is widely available we must be patient, diligent and safe … and should still follow mitigation measures,” she said.
“We’re very optimistic about this, we’re looking forward to it getting distributed widely and getting it to the whole community; I think this is a definite game changer it’s just going to take a bit longer though to get to enough people to be in good shape,” Baldwin said. “Keep wearing masks and social distancing, stay home … it will take a while to get vaccine circulating in the community. Until then, we have to stick with what we’re doing.”
Several questions were asked about the safety of the vaccine, and county immunization coordinator Lindsay Totah said that initial findings show minimal side effects.
“The limited data there is from trials showed pretty minimal adverse effects — headaches, muscle aches, but no severe reactions,” she said. “But the studies have been a limited amount of people so we will keep monitoring.”
Totah added that there have been a few reports of more severe reactions in England, but that further investigation has revealed that those people had a serious history of anaphylactic reactions, including to other vaccines.
“If you have history like that, you should touch base with your primary care physician, but if you’re just allergic to wheat or something that’s not a contraindication,” Totah said.
Full availability of vaccine to the general public is expected sometime in the spring, and it is recommended that people go through their primary care physicians to obtain the vaccine.
According to Mase, as of Dec. 15, the unadjusted cast rate in Sonoma County is 33.9 per 100,000, with a positivity rate of 7.2 and an equity metric positivity rate of 8.2.
