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A “disgusted” Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis lashed out Tuesday at people who have been gaming the COVID-19 vaccination appointment system to “jump the line” and get shots at clinics established specifically for under-served minority and low-income residents who have struggled to get vaccinations.<\/p>\n
“I am not surprised. I’m disgusted,” Solis said during a Board of Supervisors discussion of the COVID vaccination effort. “And I’m not disgusted at the work that we’re doing, but I’m more disgusted about the behavior of people in the public that are not being responsible.”<\/p>\n
Solis and other supervisors expressed outrage over people who have been managing to obtain access codes set up for vaccination clinics that were set up to target ethnic and low-income communities. The problem was highlighted over the weekend at the Ramona Gardens public housing complex in Boyle Heights, where Gov. Gavin Newsom was on hand for a clinic designed to serve residents of that community.<\/p>\n
As the clinic began operating, with a host of elected officials on hand, it was clear that some people in line to get vaccinated had driven there from more affluent parts of the Southland.<\/p>\n
“People don’t usually go in and visit from outside communities like Beverly hills or the Westside or other parts of the county,” Solis said. “But on this occasion I happened to see people that I know don’t live and reside there. This particular pod was set up for 250 individuals particularly addressing the needs of seniors 65 and older. The majority of the folks who live in that complex — there are well over 600 — the majority of them live in poverty. They happen to be Latinx, some Asian, some African-American. I can tell you off the bat I was very alarmed to hear individuals had gained access from the code, the code that is just given I think a day or even hours before the actual pod is set up, and somehow they were able to get in line ahead of the people this was intended for.”<\/p>\n
County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said the problem originates with the state’s MyTurn vaccination-appointment system. She said the system “doesn’t allow us the level of flexibility that we need to do targeted vaccinations.” In an effort to reserve appointments at a particular population, a special code is generated and provided to the clinic organizer, and people who are given the code can use it to make an appointment.<\/p>\n
Those codes, however, are frequently being circulated online and make their way into the hands of people in far-away neighborhoods, who generally have better access to computers and the internet, and they snatch up the appointments and they drive across the county to get the shots.<\/p>\n
“The code is like a way to bypass what really is at this point a failure of MyTurn,” Ferrer said. “Ideally you have an appointment system that is set up that allows you to use that appointment system for what we would call a closed registration, so you could create a clinic, for example, and just have the people you want make appointments at that clinic, whatever site it is. … Right now MyTurn doesn’t allow anybody to do that, but we all are required to use MyTurn.”<\/p>\n
The access-code system was created as way to work around the problem, but Ferrer said, “Every time we create what we think is a way to reserve slots and appointments for the people in the communities that need to get vaccinated the most, the codes get stolen or they get distributed to other people, and we’ve got problems.”<\/p>\n
Speaking to reporters Tuesday morning in Sacramento, Newsom acknowledged the issue of “abuse in terms of people getting the codes” and said a fix is in the works, moving “away from group codes to individual codes.”<\/p>\n
He said the problem was obvious during his weekend visit to Ramona Gardens.<\/p>\n
“It was pretty clear at that public housing site that not everyone was from that community, and we found out subsequently that that code, somehow a community-based organization shared that code and it was a group code,” he said. “And we started seeing people come from outside that community. So we’re working through those things. We’re correcting those.”<\/p>\n
The problem comes at a time the county is trying to address vast disparities in vaccine distribution. According to figures released last week, Black residents represented just 5.2% of all people who had received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine as of mid-February, while 33.5% were white, 23.1% Latino\/a and 19.1% Asian.\u00a0Only 24% of Black residents age 65 and older have received at least one dose of the vaccine, compared to 42.8% of white residents 65 and up.<\/p>\n
Ferrer said the county will keep working to develop better ways to reach communities hardest hit by COVID-19 and the least able to obtain vaccines.<\/p>\n
“Some of the efforts have really paid off — the mobile sites, the popup sites not requiring pre-registration, taking it right into the neighborhoods, working with the faith community to make sure that we’re actually setting up sites people can get to,” she said. “… We just have to not lose sight of the fact that we have an obligation to fix this and fix this quickly.”<\/p>\n