Booster shots are on the way. How to get your third vaccine in Sacramento

A third round of COVID-19 vaccine shots are on the way for Sacramento County residents.

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that its recommending booster COVID-19 shots for all adults who received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine regimen to extend protection against severe illness or death.

Booster shots will be available to the public starting the week of Sept. 20, with people becoming eligible for the third dose starting eight months after their second dose. People who received a Johnson & Johnson shot will also likely need a booster shot, pending further research and data.

That means the first Sacramento residents to receive their third vaccine dose under the new recommendation will be those who became fully vaccinated in or before January — largely healthcare workers, nursing home residents, and later, elderly individuals.

The new guidance comes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week recommended that those who are immunocompromised should get a booster shot because they are more at risk for serious illness and may not develop the same level of immunity from a two-shot regimen as others.

Since then, pharmacies and hospital systems like Walgreens, CVS and UC Davis Health have already begun offering appointments for immunocompromised people to receive a booster shot.

Still, the new White House recommendation is the latest development in the long and complicated campaign to protect Sacramento from COVID-19. In recent weeks, cases and hospitalizations have grown at an alarming rate in Sacramento County, fueled in large part by the highly contagious delta variant.

Though details are murky on exactly how Sacramento County residents should expect to receive booster shots, hospital systems and state health leaders say they have the supplies and the infrastructure needed to begin delivering doses this fall.

“We’ve anticipated the need for booster shots, and that we would get very little advance notice, for a long time,” said UC Davis Health’s chief operating officer for ambulatory care Michael Condrin. “This has been on our radar and we’ve been planning for it.”

The need for booster shots comes as COVID-19 vaccines have shown some declining effectiveness in recent studies. Still, vaccination offers strong protection against hospitalization, experts emphasize.

“COVID-19 vaccines continue to be remarkably effective in reducing risk of severe disease, hospitalization, and death, even against the widely circulating Delta variant,” California Department of Public Health director Dr. Tomás J. Aragón said in a statement.

“Unvaccinated Californians should make a plan to get vaccinated as soon as possible,” he added.

Booster shot rollout in Sacramento

It’s unclear whether Sacramento County will expand its current roster of community-based vaccination clinics, which includes a mass drive-thru vaccination site at Cal Expo. Other county health departments in California, such as San Mateo County, are already preparing to reopen large-scale vaccination sites, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Tuesday.

At the moment, the Sacramento County public health department “remains focused on vaccinating community members who have not yet received first and/or second vaccine shots,” spokeswoman Samantha Mott said in an email.

Currently, just over 50% of Sacramento County is fully vaccinated, according to state data, and about 83% of Sacramento County residents over 65 have received at least one shot.

Those eligible and interested in receiving a third dose should reach out to their primary care physician or sign up for appointments at pharmacies, Mott stated.

This week, UC Davis Health began offering booster shots to immunocompromised patients, and expects to deliver large quantities of vaccines to primary care clinics and doctors’ offices by the end of this week, Condrin said.

UC Davis Health will also reopen a mass vaccination site at the UC Davis MIND Institute in about three weeks, scaling up as demand for the booster shot ebbs and flows this fall and winter.

Condrin said he expects the roll out of booster shots to go more smoothly than in the early months of 2021. Vaccine demand for first and second doses have slowed during the summer, while vaccine production has ramped up considerably.

The White House recommendation for most adults also means vaccines will be doled out in a cascade effect, as residents hit their respective eight-month mark post-full vaccination.

That means people who got their shots after California opened eligibility to anyone over 16 in mid-April will not be eligible for their booster shot until the end of December at the earliest.

This story was originally published August 19, 2021 at 5:00 AM.