California clinics: More vaccines going to rich than at-risk - The Associated Press

Yet officials at community health centers that serve as the safety net for the poor in the U.S., focused on health equity, say they are not receiving enough doses for their patients — the very at-risk residents the state needs to vaccinate.

Efrain Talamantes, chief operating officer for AltaMed Health Services, said it was disheartening to watch initial doses go elsewhere while his patients continued to test positive for the virus.

But big-box administrators tend to think of community health centers as less efficient because of their smaller size, she said.

Blue Shield officials say they plan to keep open health centers that are already administering vaccines, but the clinics worry they won’t get enough doses.

Andie Martinez Patterson, vice president of government affairs at the California Primary Care Association, said while large-scale health systems can vaccinate people quickly, they likely won’t reach the targeted residents.

Community health centers have worked hard to persuade their patients to take the shot, said Alexander Rossel, chief executive of Families Together of Orange County, adding his center has inoculated 95 percent of its patients age 65 and over.

Health centers watched in dismay as vaccine for health care workers initially went to larger hospitals in December.

When Orange County started opening large-scale vaccination sites in mid-January, community health centers asked for doses too, said Isabel Becerra, chief executive of the Coalition of Orange County Community Health Centers.

Jodie Wingo, interim president of the community health association for Riverside and San Bernardino counties, said member clinics were scaling up to inoculate more of their 500,000 patients.