COVID booster shots on the way, but not for everyone. Who’s first in Fresno, Valley?
Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 shots could soon become available for third doses as boosters for people who have already been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus.
But they won’t be nearly as widespread as what the Biden administration proposed last month.
The Associated Press and McClatchy reported Friday afternoon that a panel of medical advisors to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration voted to endorse booster shots of the Pfizer vaccine for people who are 65 and older, or who have a high risk of severe complications from a coronavirus infection, provided they are six months past their second dose.
In Fresno County, health leaders are already making plans on providing the third-dose boosters to those senior citizens and at-risk people who would be immediately eligible once the proposal receives final federal approval.
“The Fresno County plan for vaccine clinics is predicated on what plan is approved by the FDA,” said Joe Prado, interim assistant director for the Fresno County Department of Public Health.
A more sweeping plan backed by President Joe Biden to make booster doses available as soon as next week for anyone age 16 or older who completed their first two doses of the Pfizer vaccine, however, was turned back by the same FDA advisory panel in an earlier vote Friday.
It remains for the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to make their decisions on boosters before any decision becomes official. A two-dose vaccine by Moderna and a single-dose product by Johnson & Johnson were not part of Friday’s votes.
The Pfizer vaccine is the only one of the three vaccines in the U.S. to have received full approval by the FDA for adults. Pfizer has emergency-use authorization for children ages 11 to 17, while the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines continue to be given only under emergency-use authorization for adults.
Demand for more doses
If the FDA had decided on wholesale availability of boosters for Pfizer shots eight months after completion of a second dose, Prado said that could represent immediate demand by next week for as many as 16,000 additional vaccine doses in Fresno County.
That would include anyone who received their second shot by mid-January, when vaccines were just starting to be made available to the general public, focusing first on senior citizens.
If the agency were to approve widespread availability six months after a second dose – people who got their second shot of the Pfizer vaccine by mid-March, when more individuals were eligible – “that’s potentially 44,000 additional doses in Fresno County,” Prado said in a media briefing before the FDA advisory panel’s second vote.
Prado said later Friday that depending on the age threshold that is ultimately approved for “high-risk” individuals, the demand in Fresno County among seniors and high-risk people could still be as high as 44,000 doses under the FDA advisory panel’s narrower endorsement of boosters only for seniors and high-risk people.
“Whatever the outcome is, we want to be ready,” Prado added.
In anticipation of making booster doses available, “we are already planning on mobilizing our mass vaccination site at Sierra Pacific Orthopedic Center (in northeast Fresno) and being able to provide doses five days a week,” Prado said.
When the first coronavirus vaccines became available in mid-December 2020, the priority was to get shots to front-line hospital workers – doctors, nurses, technicians and others who were coming into direct contact with COVID-19 patients – and the vaccines were administered by the hospitals themselves.
Larger-scale vaccine sites like the Fresno Fairgrounds, United Health Centers and Sierra Pacific Orthopedic became invaluable to the county’s vaccine efforts “when we started stepping into the general public,” Prado said, and could play a significant role once again.
But “the landscape for vaccine is totally different today” than it was in December and January, when vaccine availability was limited. Rather than a handful of large-scale vaccination sites, Prado said, “we have over 160 providers in Fresno County who are approved to administer vaccine.”
Those include 50 to 60 community health clinics that are offering shots, plus “all the commercial pharmacies locations that are available” through CVS, Rite-Aid, Walgreens and other retail pharmacies, he added. “We have a lot more doors available.”
Prado said the county will also continue to focus on mobile clinics and pop-up events to provide first and second shots in areas with lower vaccination rates.
Need to minimize confusion
Jeremy Ealand, chief operations and technology officer at Sierra Pacific Orthopedic, cautioned that people need to be aware that not everyone will be eligible for the boosters immediately, and expects considerable confusion among people who received two doses of Moderna vaccine instead of Pfizer.
“It’s important that we send a good, strong, solid message … that this is for folks the two initial doses of Pfizer only,” he said Friday.
“A lot of the coverage hasn’t been clear on the differentiation between Pfizer and Moderna,” Ealand said. “We don’t have an expectation that we’re going to be able to do Moderna next week. … We had 14,000 Fresno County residents with Moderna before we moved to Pfizer.”
“That means there’s going to be 10,000 people knocking on our door about the booster shot that we won’t be able to administer,” he added. “We’re going to open our drive-through next week, it looks like, for Pfizer for 65 and older at least, but we’re not going to be able to administer Moderna.”
“From an operational standpoint, it’s very difficult for us to treat those Pfizer patients if we’re inundated by Moderna patients that we’re having to turn away,” Ealand said.
Friday case updates
As the federal panel debated the pros and cons of endorsing booster shots, counties across the central San Joaquin Valley provided updates Friday of the latest counts of cases and fatalities from COVID-19.
Fresno County: 483 new cases on Friday, 2,194 so far this week, and 123,370 since the first confirmed infection was identified in March 2020; one additional death reported Friday, 22 so far this week, and 1,868 fatalities to date that are attributed to the coronavirus.
Kings County: 128 new cases Friday, 613 so far this week, 28,331 to date; no additional deaths Friday, five so far this week, and 279 to date.
Madera County: 60 new cases Friday, 367 so far this week, 19,849 to date; no additional deaths reported Friday, four so far this week, 258 to date.
Mariposa County: Seven new cases Friday, 78 so far this week, 967 to date; two additional deaths reported this week, 12 to date.
Merced County: 170 new cases Friday, 852 so far this week, 39,121 to date; one additional death reported Friday, 12 so far this week, and 539 to date.
Tulare County: 202 new cases Friday, 1,712 so far this week, and 59,231 to date; no additional deaths reported Friday, nine so far this week, and 889 to date.
Valleywide, more than 271,000 people have had laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases over the past 18 months, including 3,845 to have died from the virus and the respiratory disease it causes.
This story was originally published September 17, 2021 at 4:57 PM with the headline "COVID booster shots on the way, but not for everyone. Who’s first in Fresno, Valley?."
