Will your family doctor start giving COVID vaccines? A new California effort encourages it

For most of California’s seven-month vaccination campaign, the state has largely relied on mass sites and large hospital networks to get tens of millions of shots into arms as quickly as possible.

Initially, it was a race against time as California grappled with a double-digit positivity rate and a strained health care system throughout the winter. In the spring, when more people became eligible to get vaccinated, the larger sites and medical systems had the resources to meet the demand.

Since then, more than 20.6 million people in California have gotten fully vaccinated, and another 3.1 million have received at least one dose. Of all eligible Californians, nearly 70% have protection against a deadly disease that’s infected 3.7 million people and killed 63,508 in the Golden State.

Now, the state needs help vaccinating the remaining 30% of Californians who still haven’t been immunized, and it’s setting aside $40 million for the effort.

Through a program called CalVaxGrant, California will provide up to $55,000 for smaller, private doctors’ offices to kick-start vaccination efforts. The practices can’t employ more than 200 physicians, but the grant can be divided among as many as five offices.

Sami Gallegos, spokeswoman for the California Department of Public Health’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force, said the program will help connect vaccine-concerned Californians with trusted community resources, like their family doctors, pediatricians and other primary care physicians.

Unlike at large emergency sites or community clinics, where the emphasis is on vaccinating en masse, these providers can take the time to sit with their patients, answer questions and educate them on the benefits of getting inoculated against COVID-19.

“Families can feel more comfortable asking questions with their doctors,” Gallegos said. “It’s the physician they trust. It’s a person in their community that they know.”

President Joe Biden has also encouraged in recent weeks a shift from mass vaccination sites to community-based providers and pediatricians.

These doctors could have started administering vaccines back in April, Gallegos said, when “supply was no longer an issue” and around the time younger Californians were eligible for shots. But the money provided in the new grant program will incentivize offices that don’t already have the resources to come online as community vaccine centers.

The money can be spent to cover expenses like staffing, training, technology, infrastructure and supplies. Physicians for a Healthy California, the foundation associated with the California Medical Association, is administering the program, and overseeing a series of application workshops for interested practitioners, who will have until Aug. 13 to apply.

Anthony York, spokesman for the California Medical Association, said the program is part of the “last mile” to achieving herd immunity.

“In some ways, a lot of the low-hanging fruit is gone,” York said. “We have to sort of grind it out...it’s much more labor-intensive, much more slower-going. (CalVaxGrant) is just one more way that the state is stepping in to convince doctors to sign up, to build out the robust network in those hard-to-reach communities that we need to get the remaining 30% of Californians vaccinated.”

Those efforts could prove particularly helpful in communities with vaccination rates far below the state average.

Despite accounting for about 40% of the state population, Latinos in California represent half of the state’s reported COVID-19 cases and deaths, according to the California Department of Public Health. They also make up just 28% of Californians who have received at least one dose of the vaccine, state data show.

Jeffrey Reynoso, executive director for the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, said recruiting primary care physicians in the vaccine rollout could increase doses among California Latinos, as long as they have access to that care.

One survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, however, found that Latinos are less likely than whites and Blacks to get their COVID-19 vaccinations at a doctor’s office. Of the Latinos who have been vaccinated, researchers found 35% were vaccinated at a large vaccination site, 22% at a community health clinic, 17% at a pharmacy, 14% at a hospital and 4% at a doctor’s office.

Arturo Vargas Bustamante, a health policy and management associate professor at UCLA, also said the plan could help, but only as long as public vaccination sites remain open.

Often, he said, vaccine events in the community attract those who are uninsured or might not have a way to get to a doctor’s appointment without a car.

“One of the main issues of access for the vaccine among Latinos and other under-represented minorities is the fact that there is a high cost for them to go into primary care, meet with physicians,” he said.

For many immigrants, Bustamante added, obtaining a shot at a doctor’s office could mean paying out-of-pocket medical costs or missing a few hours of work in order to get to travel to an appointment, though the COVID-19 vaccine is free.

The upside to shifting more vaccinations to take place at a physician’s office, he said, would be that a doctor could answer patients’ questions about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine.

Dr. Hakeem O. Adeniyi, medical director of the Sacramento Native American Health Center, which has been administering vaccines since January, said community members who come into the center often have a list of questions about the vaccine, which take time to answer and sometimes require an established relationship with patients.

“How do these vaccines protect me against other variants? What are their risks? Is there any benefit for getting one vaccine over another?” are examples of the questions, Adeniyi said.

Adeniyi said recruiting more private practices will only help hesitant Californians feel comfortable getting vaccinated, which is the only way to finally fend off COVID-19.

“I do think it would be helpful because it’s another access point,” Adeniyi said. “Where we provide access and information, we increase chances of people getting vaccinated.”

This story was originally published July 15, 2021 at 5:00 AM.