What’s up with COVID-19 vaccine distribution in this state? It would appear that nobody knows. Not Gov. Gavin Newsom, not the counties, not the general public—nobody.
According to Newsom, the federal government sends vaccine doses directly to county public health departments. The state, he said, doesn’t have warehouses of vaccines ready to ship to counties. So, is the state involved at all in determining where the doses go?
From the Gavinator’s Jan. 25 press conference, I couldn’t say for sure. He’s sort of long-winded and has a habit of saying a lot of words that have little meaning. According to the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department, the federal government allocates vaccines to the state, which in turn offers counties a set number of vaccines each week. So the state does have a hand in determining vaccine distribution?
Umm, maybe?
Newsom isn’t being candid, and Public Health Director Dr. Van Do-Reynoso isn’t really in the know about things that go on above her pay grade. The government seems to rely on for-profit pharmacies like CVS and and Walgreens as better vaccine distributors than the amalgamation of private-public-nonprofit health care providers that we’ve managed to limp along with thus far. And those drug stores are in every community, right? Wrong.
Why don’t we have the ability to get good data on vaccine distribution?
“Some [providers] are very small, some are very efficient getting data back in the system,” Newsom said. “Some are very inefficient, because they see that as tertiary, not even secondary, to getting these things administered.”
There’s an answer for you. Hey guys, it’s not us, it’s the small guys.
Meanwhile people like Assemblymember Jordan Cunningham (R-San Luis Obispo) are eager to point the finger at Newsom’s administration, which could do a better job of informing the public its meant to serve.
In reality, though, our health care system sucks.
It isn’t built to serve everyone, which is what we’re now expecting it to do. The system is actually built to serve private citizens who have the dollars to be served by private, for-profit providers.
But the laws of supply and demand don’t work in an industry expected to serve everyone, and low-income, underserved populations fall through the cracks. So we have a patchwork system of public agencies and nonprofits that attempt to fill those gaps. And that part of the system is underfunded because the people who it serves can’t pay for the services it provides.
The system that actually serves the greater public lacks the infrastructure it needs to serve everyone because it wasn’t designed to do so. And the private part of our health care system wasn’t designed to discuss its business with the public. Our capitalist system—which, in reality, depends on government to fill in where capitalism fails—is ironically insistent that depending on government-funded services is a failure, not of the system itself, but of individuals within that system.
So here we are. In the middle of a national emergency, unable to do what needs to be done and playing the blame game. Guess what? The mess that COVID-19 revealed is everyone’s fault. Because we built the system that’s failing us and we insist on keeping it.
The canary is sick of health care. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 4, 2021.
