Long Beach residents can breathe easy, as the arrival of the swine flu vaccine is expected to arrive in the city this week.
The Long Beach Public Health Department will begin distribution plans immediately to allot the arriving vaccine to various hospitals and health care facilities throughout the city, said Helene Calvet, Long Beach health officer.
“Until we get the vaccine, don’t want to say how much we’re going to get,” Calvet said. “We know there will be one shipment initially and we’ll place another order for vaccine in right away.”
Health departments will be first to receive supplies of the vaccine, Calvet said. Private providers and other health care facilities, such as the Student Health Services at Cal State Long Beach, are expected to receive supplies in the first week of November. There are more than 170 facilities dividing the available supply.
While the exact number of doses CSULB will receive is not fully known, campus officials have a tentative plan in progress, said Angela Girard, SHS assistant director.
According to the CSULB Emergency Preparedness Web page, the university will receive 600 flu mist vaccines and 800 shots in mid-November, with possibly more coming in December.
“We’re hoping to target those living in the dorms first; young people living together are a very susceptible group,” Girard said.
Students do not need to wait for the vaccine to become available on campus; plans are underway for free public clinics to provide vaccine to uninsured high-priority group members. Pregnant women, caregivers to children less than 6 months old, health care workers, people 6 months to 24 years old and people with chronic health disorders meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendations.
Calvet said the vaccine may not be available right away for everybody under those categories.
CSULB will likely only receive a portion of the 2,400 doses ordered by SHS Director Michael Carbuto in the upcoming shipment, Girard said. Although still unconfirmed, more doses are expected to follow in subsequent shipments.
Delays in production of the virus at national manufacturers have produced a shortage of the vaccine, forcing the Long Beach Department of Health to push back the city’s anticipated distribution schedule of the H1N1 vaccine twice already, Calvet said.
“Definitely we’re going to try to get it out there as fast as we can once we get it, but the reality is that there’s just not going to be enough for everyone upfront, but eventually there will be,” Calvet said.
Delays in the production of the vaccine are the result of the virus replicating at slower speeds than the vaccine manufacturers projected, CDC Director Thomas Frieden said in a news briefing Friday.
“The vaccine strains of the virus grow, and that’s how we develop vaccine. Even if you yell at them, they don’t grow faster,” Frieden said. “Each different supplier has its own challenges, but we have to recognize that the enemy here is the virus.”
As of Oct. 23, there were 16.1 million doses of the vaccine available to be shipped overnight from manufacturers to health facilities across the country. This number is far from the amount health care officials had hoped to have by this time, Frieden said.
Despite the vaccine arriving well into the pandemic, Frieden strongly urges people to go to their health care providers.
People who think they may have contracted the H1N1 virus may have only experienced seasonal flu and will still be susceptible to the more virulent strain H1N1, he said.
It has been reported that Long Beach would receive the vaccine shortly after the main county health department received its shipment. The Los Angeles Department of Public Health held its first public clinic Oct. 23.
Part of the reason Long Beach has experienced a delay is because the city must route its orders for vaccine through the state, while the Los Angeles health department orders directly through the federal government, according to Calvet.
The best thing students and Long beach residents can do while waiting for the vaccine is to “keep going with that prevention,” Calvet said.
She said frequent hand washing, covering your mouth while coughing and sneezing, and avoiding others if you or they become sick are still the best lines of defense against contracting the H1N1 virus.