Jeffries laments over vaccine rollout

By Kevin Jeffries
Riverside County Supervisor, District 1

In what could only be described by some as the worst rollercoaster ride they’ve ever taken, the nearly month-long rollout of signing people up to obtain their vaccine shots has shown the public the ugly underbelly of government being ill-prepared for such a massive effort.

Kevin Jeffries

The Riverside County portion of the online vaccine appointment registration system initially crashed and burned before residents could even be handed off to the state-run reservation system. Then when County Public Health and IT leaders responded to the crisis and re-worked its portion of the online system, it worked so well that the state reservation system crashed and burned (but it still made the county look bad).

This recap doesn’t even cover the more serious problem of a massive shortage of vaccine supplies across the state and nation. We continue to have only a fraction of the vaccine we need to meet our demand. For today, we can talk about what we CAN fix across the county and our state, which leads to the new direction recently announced and being implemented.

First, having mostly succeeded in getting front line health care workers vaccinated, the county has now narrowed its focus to getting the vaccine to the population with the highest risk. That group is our growing senior population and will start those 85 and up. That roll-out last week was the first time the overall reservation system did NOT crash, and the online and phone reservations went pretty darn well (only a few bumps).

The county will soon be looking to expand the next round to a lower age group, likely 80 and up. Meanwhile, the private vaccination sites will continue to fine tune their operations on their own patient bases. Simultaneously an effort will be made to ramp up direct contact by those providers who gave the first vaccination to those individuals who will soon need their second vaccination.

Does this county-wide operation still have bumps? You bet! But overall, we seem to be learning from our mistakes, and it’s going much better. The biggest issue on everybody’s minds continues to be about the overall vaccine supply.

We’ve straightened out many of our early issues and are evaluating a new registration system to replace the buggy State Cal-Vax system. But, the state has decided to hand over the management of the statewide vaccination effort to two very large private providers, Blue Shield and Kaiser.

At the time of this writing, it was very unclear exactly how that was going to play out in our county. Will Blue Shield and Kaiser (and their affiliated networks) handle everyone in the private health care sector? Will all the local private hospitals, pharmacies and clinics continue with what they are doing going forward?  Will the county-run clinics/sites be assigned to simply work with Medi-Cal members, county employees and/or the indigent?

Lots of questions remain, and as per usual in this now year-long effort, answers from the state are slow to come. In the meantime, the county will continue to work with all the other private hospitals, clinics and pharmacies to make sure the vaccine roll-out continues.

Tractor-Trailer Trucks

The professional drivers of big tractor-trailer trucks need to make a living like the rest of us, but as more and more of us are ordering online (which, as we all know, hurts the brick and mortar stores), some of those truck drivers are “finding” new travel routes to avoid the freeway gridlock. Some of those routes are on streets that were never intended to handle the traffic or weight of those big trucks.

I’ve taken a hard line on approving the proposed mega-warehouses along the 215 freeway because we do not have the freeway capacity needed to support them. Despite my objection, one was recently approved that will be 2,022,364 square feet.

These trucks sometimes cut through neighborhood streets because of a lack of capacity on the freeways. We have been successful in limiting truck traffic on a few small residential streets, but state law doesn’t easily allow us to keep them off roads like Van Buren Blvd. and Cajalco Road.

We have been working on a better truck enforcement program. This past week, our local CHP has started rolling out a stronger enforcement program to keep the big trucks off our restricted neighborhood streets and making sure they are safe and legal.