San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced Friday the city is opening up three high-volume vaccination sites, with the ultimate goal of dispensing 10,000 doses per day.
The three sites will be at City College, SF Market in the Bayview and the Moscone Center and are a collaboration between the city and private healthcare systems.
The announcement came as California has struggled to distribute its supply of the vaccine, with nearly two-thirds still waiting to be dispensed.
Mayor Breed said the city is ready to open the first site next week, if the city gets a steady supply of vaccines from the state.
"We’re ready to ramp up to distributing 10,000 doses per day. If supply significantly increases, we’re ready to handle as much vaccine as we receive," the mayor said.
Local leaders have said one of the hurdles in distributing the vaccine is the lack of information on just how many doses each county is getting in total, because the state is distributing doses directly to healthcare facilities, meaning in some cases that county leaders do not have an accurate county of how many doses may be available and cannot pass that information on to residents.
"Which I know can be quite confusing. And we know in a pandemic, confusion is a huge problem and clarity is essential. People are tired, they are scared and they just wanna know what they can do to get the vaccine,” said Mayor Breed, alluding to the frustration that has mounted in recent weeks over the vaccine rollout.
She announced that the city has formed partnerships with healthcare providers to create a single network of distribution.
“The majority of doses aren’t controlled by the City and County of San Francisco. But what we’ve been working to do is to bring all of these healthcare providers together with the city to mobilize all of our efforts together.”
The three main vaccination sites will be centralized so that people can use them regardless of their healthcare provider or insurance coverage.
San Francisco, like much of the state, is still working to vaccinate people in the Phase 1A group of healthcare workers and skilled nursing facilities and expand access to seniors.
“We have a massive world class hospital system that anchors the entire region,” said Mayor Breed, a blessing in many ways, "but it also means we have between 80-90,000 frontline healthcare workers. So that tier is bigger for us than it is for other counties in this state.”
The city is also planning to open pop-up vaccine sites and mobile vaccine teams in order to increase access to people living in underserved communities - areas that have also been hardest hit by outbreaks.
Starting on Tuesday, all residents will be able to sign up through the city’s website to be notified when they qualify to get the vaccine.