Lack of supply led Sutter Health to reschedule over 20,000 COVID vaccine appointments
Sutter Health says it expects to receive the 90,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses it needs to administer patients’ second doses within six weeks of the first-dose injections, in accordance with state and federal guidelines, after having to reschedule more than 20,000 appointments that had been set for early March due to lack of supply.
The state committed 30,000 shots for each of this week and next week, and the roughly 30,000 remaining will be given to Sutter by county and local health offices, the Northern California health system said in a statement late last week.
“We’re deeply appreciative of our local health partners for working with us to further our shared goal of vaccinating as many patients as possible in the 22 counties we serve,” Sutter Health said in an emailed statement. “Rescheduling is now underway.”
Sutter Health canceled approximately 21,000 appointments, doing so last week on a rolling basis, and has begun to reschedule those, according to spokeswoman Angie Sheets.
“This number (of canceled appointments) would have been higher had we not received support from local health partners,” Sheets told The Bee via email.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in guidelines updated earlier this year, said follow-up doses of Pfizer and Moderna’s two-shot vaccines can safely come up to six weeks after the first dose without loss of efficacy.
Sutter Health says it expects to be able to complete its 90,000 second-dose appointments “well within” this time frame. However, the provider says it is still very short on vaccine supply and needs more from the state.
“It is especially important to open up to new first dose appointments, which have been on hold for a month,” the provider’s written statement last Friday continues.
The health network also says it continues to cancel first-dose appointments that had already been scheduled, also doing so on a rolling basis. Sutter began scheduling first-dose appointments for patients 65 and older in early February, but suspended new ones after about a week due to the supply issue.
Sutter Health had said early last week that it may have to “indefinitely postpone” as many as 90,000 second-dose appointments due to “extremely limited and unpredictable” supply from the state.
How or why Sutter’s supply became so limited is not entirely clear. Numerous providers, including Sacramento County, the city of Los Angeles and Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, have at varying points within the vaccine rollout expressed concerns that their supply was either unacceptably low or had dropped significantly without warning or explanation from the state.
CDPH guidelines for allocation have changed frequently. Recently, the state announced plans to target 40% of vaccine allotments to communities that rank in the lower quartile of the state’s “Healthy Places Index,” which measures quality and availability of health care across California’s ZIP codes based on a number of socioeconomic factors.
The state has not made its allocation numbers to vaccine providers — mostly made up of hospital systems and county health offices — publicly available, making it difficult to determine how the state’s push for equity is affecting individual providers’ supply amounts.
This story was originally published March 8, 2021 at 6:56 AM.
