Virtual Press Conference With County Officials Answering Questions About Glitches In Vaccine Distribution, Vaccine Hesitancy, MyTurn’s Rural Hurdles, And More

Local media were invited to participate in a virtual roundtable press conference, allowing for an opportunity to ask direct questions and follow-up questions to local leaders.  The Humboldt County Joint Information Center hosted a virtual news conference  April 21st, 2021 to provide an update on the county’s COVID-19 response, including vaccination efforts, and answer questions from local media.  Panelists included Fourth District Supervisor Virginia Bass, County Health Officer Dr. Ian Hoffman, Emergency Services Manager Ryan Derby, Economic Development Director Scott Adair and Humboldt County Vaccine Task Force Member and Family Nurse Practitioner Lindsey Mendez.  

Here are some of the main points covered in the April 21st Virtual COVID-19 Press Conference with a summary of answers from each participant, including follow-up questions by the reporters in response.

Meriah Miracle, JIC: Good morning and thank you for joining us today for Humboldt County’s COVID-19 virtual news conference. My name is Meriah Miracle.  I’m a Public Information Officer in the Humboldt County Joint Information Center, and I’ll be moderating today. 

Let’s start by introducing our participants:  Fourth District Supervisor Virginia Bass, Humboldt County Health Officer Dr. Ian Hoffman, Family Nurse Practitioner and Humboldt County Vaccine Task Force Member Lindsey Mendez, Humboldt County Economic Development Director Scott Adair, Emergency Services Manager and Emergency Operations Center Director Ryan Derby.

So, each participant will now give a brief update on what they’ve been working on in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic before taking questions. Let’s start with Family Nurse Practitioner and Humboldt County Vaccine Task Force Member Lindsey Mendez.  

1 minute in:

Lindsey Mendez, FNP:  Hello.  Today I’m going to be coming to talk about allocations of the COVID vaccine and also My Turn, which is going to be explained first. 

So, My Turn has been a transition we’ve been going through in the State of California as a way to register anyone who’s eligible in the state of California for a vaccine. With that said, we’ve had some bumps in the road and we’ve had some changes with geofencing and that’s what My Turn calls the ability to open or close a specific geographic region so that it limits who can get to the vaccine.

For a little while it was closed to a 50 mile radius but it’s now been open to a 200 mile radius which is extremely helpful for Humboldt County and other areas. So this should be easier for people all around the county to get vaccine appointments right now.  And we would encourage everyone to keep on going onto My Turn to register and checking on the status of their vaccine, since we have many appointments available right now in Humboldt County.

That being said, with the side of allocation this goes hand in hand. When we talk about how we allocate the COVID-19 vaccine, it comes from initially a state allocation and then it goes into counties, but now the TPA, which is Blue Shield, is going to be helping the state with doing those allocations and positioning of the orders of the vaccine. When you look at how that happens, my team does advisory and also allocations.

We have a few people in the task force who look at the numbers weekly of who needs vaccine in the area and how much vaccine we need in general and what kind of clinics we’ll be setting up for that week of allocation.  So, when we say we have different numbers each week of how much vaccine we get or we say that we have all this vaccine in our county for this one week or maybe we are running out of vaccine this week it’s because of the schedule. So we would encourage every person who is eligible to get the vaccine right now to go on to My Turn to try to get their appointment because we’d like to get as many vaccines out every week as humanly possible and empty our freezers.

So that is the status of both My Turn and appointments and allocations.  Obviously we are having a little bit of a drawback with Jannsen right now with our allocations as we are not able to use it at present, but Dr. Hoffman will be talking about that a little later.

Thank you.

Meriah Miracle:  Thank you, Lindsey.  Ryan, can you share an update about the Emergency Operations Center?

4 mins in:

Ryan Derby, EOC: Yes, good morning.  So I’m going to touch on just a couple things. Just a brief overview of what the EOC has been doing and some future plans for transitions in our response. So throughout the pandemic and more specifically now, the EOC has been focused on planning and logistical components of the response, supporting Public Health with material acquisition for the vaccine clinics for testing ensuring state and federal compliance with response guidelines and also providing the management structure for the public information, the financial component and the planning piece of our response Our goal is to provide the things and the people to make Public Health successful in their vaccine efforts and their testing efforts.

With that being said, we’re actively working on plans to transition that to the Public Health, essentially demobilizing the EOC and transitioning back to a DOC at the end of June and still providing some of that logistical support, but that will allow us to focus on upcoming fire season and other emergencies that could be coming up in the future. 

Right now the biggest push is on vaccine outreach. I think it’s been said over and over again that we have thousands of doses that we need to get out into the community, so our public information section or our joint information center is actively working on that vaccine outreach and we’re exploring different ways to make that message loud and clear.

We’re hopeful that with the geofencing issue being worked out with My Turn that we’ll start seeing and uptick in that vaccination rate. 

That concludes my brief report.

Meriah Miracle: Thank you Ryan.  Supervisor Bass, can you share an update?

6 mins in:

Supervisor Virginia Bass: Yes.  Thank you very much for having me this morning. As you can imagine, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about when county offices are going to open completely and we know that is a really important step in our road to recovery. 

And to that end I do want to share with all of you that in May we will be having a discussion at one of our Board of Supervisors meetings, as yet to be determined which one, regarding the concept of coming back to work on June 15, employees, Board of Supervisors, everyone we can possibly get here.

It’s really important for the community to see us moving forward and this date also coincides with the date of reopening California. So, it’ll be an interesting conversation and a lot of work to do. 

Over the past year we were all introduced to ZOOM. It was all really strange at first and confusing, but now it’s become commonplace and is one of the most important ways of doing business these days. Even though it is still strange and confusing sometimes. But we realized that over the experiences of the last year that employees can be extremely productive when they work away from work.

So it’s given us an opportunity to think about teleworking in the future. So we’ll also be bringing forward an ad hoc committee to have a conversation about telework for our employees and we think it’s going to be a wonderful fit. It doesn’t mesh for every department we have or every job but it certainly has a lot of usage that we can do a lot more with that just like we’re doing right now. But in the meantime please know that all county departments are open to some degree. We can’t wait ‘til they all reopen completely. In the meantime, if you have questions about services and want to find out what’s available, just go to humboldtgov.org and there’s a tab called government services.

Hopefully we won’t have to worry about that and we’ll just be all open soon. So that’s basically what I’m going to share with you today. 

Meriah Miracle:  Thank you Supervisor Bass.  Scott, can you please give an update?

8 mins in:

Scott Adair: Yea, I’d be happy to. My name is Scott Adair and I’m the Economic Development Director for the County of Humboldt.

Our office manages and administers a number of programs to help the business community through this pandemic. As it’s widely known this is a global economic crisis as well as a public health crisis. Our office just concluded the SBRR grant which is the Small Business Restart and Recovery program. As of to date, almost $3.4 million has been put back into over 700 businesses to provide aid and assistance and COVID relief for the business community. It’s important to share that that’s not just an unincorporated county effort. That includes businesses in all of the municipalities as well who were part of that program.

Our office also continues to manage and administer the new reopening plan process. Until recently, businesses were required to submit their actual written reopening plans and those were reviewed and those businesses were given certification to reopen.

Once those reopening plans were successfully reviewed and considered as sufficient or passed the approval process. Now, businesses are asked simply to have a plan and comply with the local health orders and restrictions from our Public Health officer and from our Governor’s office and to watch an instructional video and to take a quiz demonstrating that they know and have a knowledge and understanding of what it is that they are required to do. Once they demonstrate that they have that knowledge and they pass that quiz, they get a certification from our office. This has cut the time down, we’ve been told talking with businesses, one quarter of the time that was spent on the old process. So we’ve made the process more efficient and we’ve improved it for businesses so they can focus on their main operation which is to create revenue for their businesses and their stakeholders. 

Our office also concluded an outreach survey ummm our office reached out to over 30 businesses representing 26 different industries, and those industries were diverse. And those industries were diverse, ranging from credit unions, to coffee shops, to a dairy farm to ask how they’ve been impacted by the county’s policies and restrictions on businesses. 

And we received that feedback and identified some top priorities and concerns and shared those concerns with our Supervisors and other county administration so they have that information and they can use that to help inform and guide some of the decisions they are making with regard to any impacts they can have on the business community. And then finally our office continues to aggregate and collect data on programs and loans and other assistance opportunities to provide our business community with relief and with support and we have all of that information housed online on our website and we continue to engage with the business community in different conversations and stakeholder groups with discussions to collect input from the community and to share that data with them.

Meriah Miracle:  Thank you Scott. Dr. Hoffman? Can you share an update?

12 mins in:

Dr. Ian Hoffman:  Thank you Meriah. Thanks everyone for being here today. I’ll start with a brief update just on the epidemiology. I talked about this at the Board of Supervisors yesterday. You know we’re definitely at a new place in the pandemic with large portions of the county being vaccinated.

We’re now around 50% of all residents who are eligible who are 16 and over now have at least one dose of vaccine, which is fantastic. Still a long ways to go but we definitely have made incredible strides. We have 80% of our 65 plus population with at least one shot. We’re really in a different place. However, we’re still seeing cases. The case counts are rising again.

This is something that we’ve been expecting. We’ve seen it in other places. As we reopen we’re going to see more cases, so our case counts are still not below where they were since before November.  And we’ll hope that we can turn this tide, but they are increasing over the past week.

So I want to remind everyone that we’re not out of this yet. Please continue to follow all of the state health officer guidance for gatherings for the blueprint around businesses and what can be open. The other thing just to update folks on. 

A lot of questions right now about Johnson & Johnson, what’s going on with it. What we know right now is that on Friday the CDC is going to meet again to review the data and see what’s happened in the last week since they last met and give some recommendations so we’ll be anticipating some form of guidance that will come out after that meeting on Friday. And I’m happy to answer questions about that and anything else as we go on to the next phase of this.

Thank you.

Meriah Miracle:  Thank you all very much.  So now we’ll move on to questions from reporters.

Please try to limit your conversation to a single topic, and if other reporters have follow-up questions about that topic, you can raise your hand and we’ll take those afterward. And a reminder that we have a hard end time of 10:30 this morning.

So let’s start with Lost Coast Outpost’s Ryan Burns.

15 mins 20 secs in:

Question by Ryan Burns, Lost Coast Outpost: Hi, thanks.  So you’ve mentioned that there are thousands of vaccine doses available this week, and over the weekend the Chronicle had a story about the county sending a thousand Pfizer doses to San Francisco because the county had overestimated local demand.

But we know there are still tens of thousands of locals who haven’t gotten vaccinated, so I’m curious if you have any theories about why demand has dropped off and what the plans are for the remaining population.

Meriah Miracle:  Thanks, Ryan. Ian, do you want to speak to that?

16 mins in:

Dr. Ian Hoffman:  I think what we’re seeing is what has been seen in a lot of places across the state.   That we get to a certain point and demand drops off pretty suddenly. The Chronicle had another story today about Napa county and their experience with this and it’s something the state health officers have been talking about for, some of them 3 or 4 weeks now they’ve been experiencing this so we’re a little bit delayed on this. We’re seeing it a little bit later than a number of other counties. I think there could be a number of reasons. 

Like Lindsey mentioned, the change to My Turn is certainly one of them. I think we went from a scarcity mentality to an overabundance mentality pretty rapidly so hopefully there are still folks out there who want appointments. With this information getting out there that there are a lot of appointments available, they’ll be able to match up to those appointments. So My Turn is a great place to go. We fixed that geofencing thing; I tested it this morning.  If you’re in Garberville and you put Garberville, it’s going to show you every clinic from Arcata to Redding.  So that should be helpful for people.

And just getting the word out that the vaccine is no longer scarce so there’s no more waiting your turn. It’s everyone’s turn now so go ahead and take it.  Thank you.

Lost Coast Outpost:  May I ask a quick follow-up?

Dr. Hoffman: Yes.  My apologies.

18 mins in:

Question by Lost Coast Outpost: Ok thanks.  I’m curious.

I see a lot of comments online from folks who are skeptical of the vaccine. Do you have any sense of what portion of the population is vaccine hesitant and what are the Public Health implications if we do have a significant portion of the population that just declines to get the vaccine?

18 mins 30 secs in:

Dr. Hoffman: Certainly it’s something that’s being talked about a lot.  It’s hard to know if that’s what we’re meeting up against or if it’s really this change in technology to My Turn, the change in mentality from a scarcity mentality to an abundance to a . Certainly as a physician I understand that there are patients who don’t want vaccine or are hesitant. My approach as a physician is we try to recognize where they’re coming from and see if we can meet somewhere. So i think there are going to be folks who are going to need more outreach to get into the clinics, but I don’t think that’s what we’re seeing right now. I think what we’re seeing right now is a change in technology, a change in the way we’re getting the vaccine out. And getting it out in different ways.

Lindsey can talk to some of the other ways we’re going to be working to get mobile clinics going out to rural areas, to get the homebound, to get to people who have a difficult time traveling 50, 60 miles to a mass vaccination site. Or just that they, maybe that’s not the best place for them and their doctor is not giving vaccine.  

So there’s a lot of barriers still. We need to break down the barriers to the point we’re starting to get to. But I still think there’s a lot of people out there who would benefit from a mass vaccination center, so we’re hopeful we can continue to get those folks in while we have the mass vaccination centers going in the next few weeks. the point we’re starting to get to.  But I still think there’s a lot of people out there who would benefit from getting vaccinated in a mass vaccination center, so we’re hopeful that we can continue to get those folks in while we have the mass vax centers going in the next weeks.

20 mins 20 secs in:

Lindsey Mendez, FNP:  Sure, hi guys, thank you for your time. The other portion of what I’ve been working on right now through the public health branch is having a task force that is dedicated to doing mobile outreach and that’s going to be called the medical mobile unit that’s dedicated to vaccine. We have partners in this community who also do mobile outreach so the coordination effort is a little more complex than just public health just going out alone. 

For example, Open Door is doing mobile health outreach and United Indian Health has also confirmed this for their homebound patients. So the idea behind vaccine hesitancy is so broad as what Dr. Hoffman just said. People can have vaccine hesitancy or medication hesitancy or healthcare hesitancy for many reasons that are just ranging from geographic barriers and transportation to thinking, “I’m not sick, I don’t need it right now”, or “no one in my life has been effected immediately and I don’t need it right now”, to myths, to people just not wanting to be vaccinated in general.

It is the job of the public health branch right now to parse out those small details, to figure out why are these areas near the incorporated areas where mass vaxes are being held, why aren’t they as saturated with vaccine as other regions?

Right now the data is not strong enough for us to have an exact answer for that and so I have a team of three people who are actively investigating this. And we are also going to use a method of trying to hit every single community to offer them vaccine.  And that’s going to be a test that’s going to be going on for months.

Part of the schedule will also be an interest list for persons who are homebound and need of assistance and then we will be following up with that. 

22 mins 30 secs in:

Question by The North Coast Journal, Thad Greenson:  I think first I just want to follow up a quick followup question to what Ryan was asking.   Lindsay, you mention that you have three people who are actively investigating this.  Can you kinda give us some insight into what that investigation looks like, what some of the methods are at play there, and how you’re trying to get that information?

25 mins 50 secs in:

Lindsey Mendez, FNP: Sure.  First things first – we use two different kinds of data. We use what’s called CAIR data, which is the vaccine registry system for California. That’s supposed to be very active data as long as people are entering their data into CAIRS California which we’re supposed to do with permissions.

And the other thing is an equity map that we’re given or a saturation map that we’re given by both Blue Shield and the state to show us what percentages of specific regions have been vaccinated, and we can hover over specific regions on this map and we can look at it.  It can also break things down for us like age, and sex, ethnicity, and first and second doses. So it gives us a little more data, even.  And we also break down how much every week right now we’re dealing in terms of allocations and how much distribution of each kind of vaccine going to different areas. 

So the three people who are on my task force with me are – I have one person who is actively working with facilities and persons who live in congregate settings and then homebound persons, and she is coordinating with that population. Another person on the team is coordinating the fire departments, elementary schools, and farmers’ markets, and other places that we can go around the county with a mobile medical unit.

And then my third person is working on compliance and a scope of operations and training for the professionals who will be on this unit so that we can have consistency and good communication. 

24 mins 25 secs in:

Question by The North Coast Journal: Fantastic, thank you. 

And then I guess I’m kind of dovetailing on that, I’m wondering to what extent Public Health has worked directly with care providers on kind of what strategies they should use to talk to patients and guide them through this very personal decision about whether vaccination is right for them?

25 mins in:

Lindsey Mendez, FNP:  There are so many different methods of how we would help care providers in their own offices, especially if they are giving vaccine, and there are providers for the COVID 19 vaccine program. We encourage many times, especially in rural health care, that you have many times many frequent conversations with your patients about things that they may be hesitant about.

And we have many resources on the CDC website, also on a lot of pediatric websites because we deal with vaccine hesitancy very often in the pediatric setting. This has to do with myth busting, but you can also just sit down and do listening sessions with your clients or your patients. Like what Dr. Hoffman was saying that trying to meet them in the middle or trying to meet them where they are about any concerns about a vaccine. 

Meriah Miracle:  Dr. Hoffman, would you like to add?

26 mins in:

Hoffman: Sure, I think there are a lot of good studies out there about vaccine hesitancy and how to work with families and patients who have concerns about vaccine. Lindsey and her team have worked with all of the providers since the beginning, educating them on all things around this vaccine from the handling and storage, the ordering of it, how to make the clinics, how to run the clinics and how to talk about the vaccine with other healthcare providers.

In the beginning we were talking about vaccine hesitancy among healthcare providers and how to talk to our colleagues about it because there were certain people even in healthcare who didn’t want to get the vaccine or who wanted to wait because we were the first ones.

So I think there’s a lot of information out there. We’re working with everyone to try and get it out there. And there will be a point where it’ll be obvious that the only folks left are the ones who have great barriers to getting the vaccine, or there some of the folks who just don’t want it at all.

But I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that point right now. 

27 mins 35 secs in:

Question by Nancy Garcia, from El Lenador:  Hi. I’ve been checking the county website and I’ve seen that the percentage of hispanics and latinos that have been vaccinated is very low compared to other demographics. I think it was around 6 or 8% the last time I checked.  So I wanted to ask why you think that there is such a disparity?

28 mins in:

Dr. Hoffman:  Yeah, it is something that we’ve noted across the whole state and obviously there have been a lot of efforts to try to outreach to that community. I think again this goes back to the same things we’ve been talking about. 

What are the barriers to getting vaccinated?  There are logistical barriers.  A lot of these folks’ work schedule doesn’t fit with the mass vaccination clinic so we’ve tried to the best of our ability, to go to workplaces where we think the latinx communities are working. 

We’ve worked with a lot of larger businesses that have a large proportion of latinx workers and Spanish-speaking workers. We’ve made the clinics Spanish-language friendly by making sure that there’s appropriate forms in Spanish, that there are people there who speak Spanish in every station along the way so people can feel comfortable and confident. 

MyTurn also can be viewed in Spanish. There’s still work to be done. The data that we have show that it’s about a 10% difference between the hispanic population and the white population in Humboldt County and it’s pretty close to what we see in a lot of other places across California. I did some outreach last week, met with a group called LatinoNet to talk about vaccination efforts and get the word out, so hopefully now that we have open eligibility to everyone 16 and over, we’ll start to see more of those barriers break down. But it’s going to take some time.

And we’re going to continue through the mobile outreach and other efforts in schools. Going to schools that have a higher latinx population, working with providers who are not yet authorized to be a vaccine provider.  Trying to get them enrolled so that in the next days when we open up to kids and younger groups that we can bring some of these families in and get them vaccinated.

30 mins 35 secs in:

Question by Nancy Garcia, from El Lenador:  Thank you. 

Are there going to me anymore walk-thru clinic days that you had scheduled already like the ones you had Friday through Sunday? 

Dr. Hoffman:  Yes, Nancy. The schedule for walk-in hours was posted yesterday and I can send you that news release following the news conference just so you have the most recent schedule.

31 mins in:

Question by Taylor Elliot, Redwood News:  Hi, there. So my question is, I know that last week you guys announced, what we’re calling 10 local breakout cases in people that are fully vaccinated.

So given that for Pfizer and Moderna have to wait 21, 28 days between doses, what about infections in between doses?  Do we have any of those reported locally? I mean, is that common?  Is that happening?  What are the severity of symptoms for those infections?

31 mins 45 secs in:

Dr. Hoffman: Great question, Taylor.  I don’t have any data on that specifically for Humboldt County.

It’s not something that we track as much as the breakthrough cases, which would be someone who is at least two weeks out from the last dose of their vaccine. I do want to let everyone know that those 10 cases that we know about were all asymptomatic or extremely mild cases. So no one was very sick in that group.

It’s not to say that someone can’t get sick. I mean, the vaccine is not 100%, but it’s very efficacious. What we’re seeing across the world is that these breakthrough cases are quite rare and they fit that same as what we’re seeing locally in that they’re asymptomatic of very mild and that the data that was seen in the clinical trials supported that very few people got severe illness and no deaths.  The clinical trials is really supported with millions and millions of people now vaccinated across the world. This is expected. We’re going to see more cases like that. 

Anecdotally to your question, Taylor, I know of cases from other counties where people were partially vaccinated. And I know of some here, I just don’t have the data on the numbers. There have been cases where people have gotten sick between the two doses and have had more severe disease. So we want to get everyone those two doses. Don’t think that if you have one dose you’re set.  You really want that fully vaccinated status to get to follow the rules of the fully vaccinated folks and loosen your precautions that are now allowable by CDC and CDPH guidelines for fully vaccinate people.

34 mins in:

Question by Taylor Elliot, Redwood News:  And I did have one follow-up question about that waiting period in between doses. So I know that people that got their first does before the official transition to MyTurn.  I know they were told that Public Health would reach out to them about scheduling their second dose. I know I’ve personally gotten questions from people. 

If they’re coming up on that date of their second dose and they haven’t heard from Public Health, what should they be doing?

And then I had someone ask specifically, could they try to get a second dose from another location? Is that even a thing?

34 mins 35 secs in:

Dr. Hoffman: We encourage people to keep and eye out for the email if they’re coming up.

We have a large second dose clinic coming up later this week. Is that right, Lindsey? For Friday.

People should have gotten that invite already that went out earlier this week. But if you’re within a week, less than seven days, from the due date for your second dose and you got it through one of the earlier Public Health clinics, that was not through MyTurn, and you haven’t heard anything, call the JIC. 441-5000.  And they can definitely help you out. Because certainly some people’s email, it gets stuck in the spam box or goes to the trash.

We want to make sure all those people get an appointment.

35 mins 45 secs in:

Question by Taylor Elliot, Redwood News:  Do they have to get their appointment through Public Health?

Dr. Hoffman:  If they have an opportunity to get it somewhere else, it’s fine. But if you get that email, you don’t have to go searching somewhere else. 

36 mins  in:

Meriah Miracle: : So we’ll run back through the participants here.  Ryan Burns from Lost Coast Outpost, do you have any additional questions?

Question by Ryan Burns from LoCO:  Dr. Hoffman, you said earlier that around 50% of the eligible population is at least partially vaccinated. But the county dashboard currently has it at about 35% of the total population. If my math is right, that means about 30% of the population is ineligible. Is that about right?

And aside from being under age 16, what are the most common reasons for being considered ineligible? 

37 mins in:

Dr. Hoffman: That is the only thing right now that would keep you out of the eligibility is based on age because the eligibility is open to everyone. I think the 16 and under population is around 27,000. That’s where you’re seeing that number. And Meriah, I think that gets updated today and that’s last week’s numbers.

I’m quoting real time data that we have both from CARE report from this week which will go up today and also reports from CDPH, which they are going to start posting, as well on their website in the coming week or two. 

37 mins 30 secs in: 

Question by Ryan Burns from LoCO: One last thing.  The statewide average for counties that CDPH is putting out is around 51, 52%. We’re right there with the rest of the state. You also said that 80% of the 65-plus have had at least one shot. The dashboard as it stands is quite a bit lower than that. Is that just because it’s last week’s data?

Dr. Hoffman: Yep. Yep.  Exactly.

Meriah Miracle: : Dr. Hoffman is right, Ryan.  We will update that this afternoon. So we’ll have the latest information available today.

38 mins 30 secs in:

Question by Thadeus Greenson, North Coast Journal: We talked a fair amount about getting a vaccine being a personal decision. But there’s obviously a community component to it. 

The state’s goals of dropping restrictions June 15 is contingent on vaccination efforts.  Experts say we need to reach 75, 80% to achieve herd immunity. I’m curious to hear from each of you kinda what’s at stake for Humboldt County as a community in a community-wide vaccination effort in reaching that herd immunity level. 

39 mins in: 

Meriah Miracle: Dr. Hoffman, can you start us off?

Dr. Hoffman: Yeah, we can put any number we want on herd immunity because the true answer is we just  don’t know. So for me, personally as a physician in this community and a member of this community I think that the goal is to get as many people vaccinated as possible. So there’s no percentage that I would put on there that’s going to magically get us to herd immunity. So the vaccination effort is a community effort. It involves all of us. I think we’re at the point now where we need to talk about it more. 

Again, moving from that scarcity mentality and that this is now available to everyone. Your turn is up for all of us. Utilizing our networks through business, through organizations, through family, churches, whatever your sphere is right now, you need to talk about vaccination and encourage people to go out and get vaccinated. So we’re doing that campaign locally through the JIC. You’ll start to see some of those ad campaigns coming out soon. Sort of similar to the “wear a mask” campaign that has been going on throughout the whole pandemic around vaccination. I think that everyone has a personal responsibility if they want us to get there to start to talk about vaccination and encourage folks to get vaccinated.

Meriah Miracle: Scott?

41 mins in:

Scott Adair:  Yes, I think everyone has heard the phrase that the best remedy for the economy is a cure for the disease. There’s something to be considered here in terms of how consumer confidence impacts local spending, local saving activity and how the pandemic impacts consumer confidence. Consumer confidence, the first quarter of last year right after the first shelter in place order started going into effect, dipped from 118 points to 86 points – that’s the consumer confidence index. 

A lot of economists and agencies throughout the country viewed the consumer confidence index as the number one indicator of how our economy is doing. And that is why health and economics go hand in hand. Studies have already proven that as COVID cases grow, consumer confidence declines and if consumers feel unsafe then they’re less likely to engage in economic activity. Or at least, less likely to engage in local physical economic activity. And they may over participate in online economic activity, which is not necessarily always local.

So from an economics perspective and for the business community, the more vaccines that we get out into the community, the more safe consumers will feel. And the safer they feel, the more likely that they are to spend money and spend it locally. 

43 mins in:

Supervisor Bass:  I was thinking along the same lines as Scott in many ways. But I think people don’t realize that there is a real danger that we can still go backwards. And now that people are excited and moving forward, kids are in school, all these different things are happening… we are not immune from going backwards.  And that is not good for employment, that’s not good for families, that’s not good for their tax base.

I think a lot of it is connected to what Scott was saying and I think there is a real danger.

I know people that are saying “we’re good now”. It’s like no, we’re not. You can’t say that at this point.

And I also think it’s important for the government.I talked about reopening. Right now, the government does not seem like we’re open to people and to the public and that is what we’re here for. We have as open of meetings as we can possibly figure out how to do under the constraints, but it’s not the same. We had a Measure Z conversation yesterday and everyone was basically saying nobody was there.  

Nobody weighed in, nobody watched and when something like that which usually gets a lot of energy from community members, you know there’s a problem. To me, that’s part of the reopening completely. It’s not just about the jobs and the economy and families – government is an important part. We may seem like we’re a real pain in the rear at times, but it is a place and it’s a place where we need the public to be. And right now, they’re excluded and I think we need to move forward on that so that we are open again to the public and lead the way. And that’s basically my overall thoughts on it, I could probably think of a lot more because it really agitates me when people just seem to blow it off. 

45 mins in:

Ryan Derby:  My office looks at vaccination as our transition to recovery.   So the more people that get vaccinated, the more economic stimulus we’re going to see. The more recreational activities are going to open up, less restrictions we’re going to have on gatherings and events. And to be frank, everyone is sick of this. Everyone is tired of dealing with the pandemic. And the best way to get through this and to get over the pandemic is to get vaccinated. I know Dr. Hoffman has talked about going to Crab’s games; if those are activities that you like to do, get vaccinated. 

We have private events that are opening back up, but there are different restrictions for people that don’t get vaccinated and those that do. Your life will become a lot more normal if you do go out and get that vaccination, or both rounds of vaccination. 

And to Chair Bass’ point, opening government back up, opening businesses back up; that’s only possible through these mitigation tactics of getting vaccinated. So for us, we’re looking at ways to bolster our outreach and get those clinics full and get all of our allocations out.  It really is important.

I know there is hesitancy in the community, or maybe a lack of access, but the more we work through those challenges and get vaccine into arms, the more normal life will become. So I hope that addresses your question.  

47 mins in:

Lindsey Mendez, FNP:  Hi thank you. I’m going to say a couple things about this. I think that in the question that came out about “what is at stake” I think that stuck with me the most with the question. As a person who loves all people, but specifically cares for children usually, I feel so strongly about the things that are at stake for our community members like our children. 

We do not want to go backwards. We do have a mental health crisis. We have a housing crisis.

We have many things that are competing with the pandemic right now that are not sustainable for many households and many community members and everybody is feeling that heat. 

I know right now it is very hard to see the forest for the trees, right, for what this huge project is of getting vaccine out. But to tie it back in a little bit to how the allocation works is the big picture. The reason why they tell us to get vaccine out every week and empty our freezers is because we want to end this pandemic. We want children back in school next year. We want children playing sports.

We don’t want them to have to lose all of their friends. We want families to be able to do vacations together and see each other on holidays. And that is how we’re going to do it by emptying our freezers of vaccine every single week. And we’re going to continue to do that, right? And that’s kind of what I hear when I think of what is at stake.

Meriah Miracle: : Thank you.  Nancy Garcia from El Lenador, any additional questions?

Nancy Garcia from El Lenador:  No, no follow up questions.

Meriah Miracle: : Great. Thank you.  And Taylor Elliot from Redwood News?

Redwood News: No, I’m alright.

49 mins in:

Meriah Miracle: Well, we have just a few more minutes if anyone has any additional questions?

Question by Ryan Burns from LoCO: Sure, I’ll ask another one. 

I’m just curious with the thousand doses that were sent down to San Francisco, do you have any plans for if you do take some vaccine out of the freezer and it winds up that you don’t have enough arms to put them in, what are the plans for what to do with that surplus?

49 mins 30 secs in:

Ryan Derby:  I can speak a little bit to that before handing it over. We have a system through Public Health called MOAC Medical Health Operational Area Coordinator.  And routinely we’ll see requests through that MOAC system from other counties either in our region or throughout the state, needing vaccine for a mass clinic that they have.  

So it worked out really well with the thousand doses to San Francisco. On Thursday San Francisco put out a regional request for a thousand doses and we had a thousand doses to give.  So that ensures region wide, statewide that those doses don’t end up going to waste or getting thrown away.

And locally we do have a call-down list of people who haven’t been vaccinated who can show up at a clinic or show up at Public Health to expend a few doses at the end of a clinic day. But for those larger trays, or those thousand doses that we gave out, it’s really kind of a regional or statewide effort to make sure that they are getting into arms and not getting wasted. 

Question by Ryan Burns from LoCO: So, is it- can you say whether there have been any doses locally that have gone to waste, or have they all been put into arms?

50 mins 35 secs in:

Dr. Ian Hoffman: Certainly throughout the four, going on five months that we’ve been  vaccinating, there have been a few doses wasted here and there. In the first few months it was zero because of the limited supply and high demand. 

As we get closer into what we’re seeing now which is clinics not filling, I think we will see more wasted doses. It’s something that again has been seen in other places that the expectation had been all along that the clinics would fill because that’s what we’d been seeing for months and months. 

So when they don’t fill, it makes our job a lot harder and you can have wasted doses. But we do have protocols in place to prevent that.  We have the call-down list, we have the MOAC system.

There is demand still in other places and i think that the demand here will continue to go up again once we get through some of the technological issues and get the word out about this change to an abundance mentality from the scarcity mentality. So locally, very few doses have been wasted and it’s not a problem and now that we know what to expect with the clinics, hopefully we’ll get them filled and then we can bring the appropriate amount of vaccine to that clinic.

And actually that brings up another point of people showing up for their appointments. We are starting to see a larger no-show rate and we really want to encourage people to show up for that appointment so we don’t have wasted doses because we need to make sure we have a vaccine for a person when they book that appointment, but then if they don’t show up, there is a potential that that vaccine could go to waste. 

Meriah Miracle: That’s about all the time we have today. I can’t thank you all enough for participating and joining us for today’s news conference. 

Community members with questions or concerns are encouraged to call 441-5000 for additional information. 

For updates on vaccination distribution in California, go to cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/COVID-19Vaccine.aspx.

Local information is also available online at humboldtgov.org or during business hours by contacting [email protected] 

Local COVID-19 vaccine information: humboldtgov.org/vaccineinfo,

Humboldt County COVID-19 Data Dashboard: humboldtgov.org/dashboard,

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Humboldt Health Alert: humboldtgov.org/HumboldtHealthAlert