As Santa Barbara County races to vaccinate as many residents as possible and ward off the spread of more dangerous COVID-19 variants, public health officials say not all available vaccine appointments are filling up, and a significant chunk of community members remain on the fence about getting inoculated.
“The scarcity of vaccine supply does not seem to be a problem anymore,” Public Health Officer Dr. Henning Ansorg said at an April 23 press conference. “As a matter of fact, we have noticed that not all vaccination appointments are filling up at our sites at North County, or at Cottage Hospital in South County.”
The county has a goal of vaccinating around 80 percent of the population, but only 28 percent of county residents were fully vaccinated as of April 27, and there’s a clear disparity between regions: While more than 75,000 South County residents are fully vaccinated, just 34,000 North County and almost 21,000 mid county residents have received both shots or a single dose vaccine, according to the Community Data Dashboard.
Ansorg estimates that about 60 percent of the county’s population is ready and willing to be vaccinated, but the remaining 40 percent are either unsure or unwilling.
“We know that there’s around 20 percent of people who are categorically against vaccinations in general, whether it’s influenza or pneumonia shots or anything,” he said. “Twenty percent are what we call ‘on the fence’: they haven’t quite decided. … This 20 percent, that’s where we really want to make an extra effort, to go the extra mile, to bring it to them.”
The county ran two first dose vaccine clinics on April 27 and 28 in Santa Barbara and Santa Maria, each offering the opportunity to walk up without an appointment and get the shot.
Public Health Director Dr. Van Do-Reynoso said during the press conference that, in partnership with Herencia Indígena, new videos in two Mixteco dialects on how to access and use the My Turn vaccine scheduling platform are up on the organization’s YouTube page.
Do-Reynoso added that the county recently set up five mobile teams to bring vaccines straight to workplaces, housing facilities, places of worship, warehouses, and community organizations. Three of the bilingual mobile teams are based in North County, one in mid county, and one in South County. If a community partner is interested in hosting a mobile site, they can contact mobileclinic@sbcphd.org. The county announced April 26 that, following the direction of the California Department of Public Health, it will resume Johnson & Johnson vaccine administration at some of these Mobile Vaccine Program clinics.
“Participants will be given the option to select a different vaccine if they would like,” a department statement said. “Other vaccine opportunities with the J&J vaccine may also become available beginning as early as this week.”
Ansorg said getting more local people vaccinated is essential to stopping the spread of more dangerous COVID-19 variants that are running rampant in other parts of the world.
“It is only a question of time that these more aggressive forms of the virus will arrive here as well,” he said. “The best protection we have is to get immunized as soon as possible. I would like to encourage everyone who is still on the fence about whether or not to get the COVID shot to please go ahead and take it.”
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 6, 2021.