17 February 2021
Sonoma County’s newest vaccination option opened Tuesday: a walk-in clinic at the Veterans Memorial Hall in Sonoma, where up to 300 doses a day will be administered to a widening range of residents, starting with those 70 years old and up.
The new site brings the total capacity of the county-supported clinics to as many as 3,000 vaccinations per day. (That sum does not include the doses allotted to local hospitals or health clinics working independently.)
The growing network reflects a significant expansion of capacity in the three weeks since the county’s first public site, operated by OptumServe in Rohnert Park, began immunizing seniors on Jan. 27.
Still, the weekly supply of shots distributed to the county — just 8,025 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccine this week for nine clinics — remains too small a stream for the larger pipeline established by the county, leading to limited appointments that are filling up within hours of their first availability.
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Paul Gullixson, the county’s communications chief. “We’re pleased to get that many, as that’s the most that we’ve been allocated to date for any single week. But we have the capacity to do much more than that. At this point, it’s just an issue of distributing them equitably to make sure clinics have enough to meet their needs for second doses as well as their objectives for first doses.”
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