Updated COVID shots will be “widely available” in Los Angeles County by the middle of next week, public health officials said Thursday.
“There will be a gradual rollout to get vaccines on the ground, and it will take some time to get scheduling systems set up,” said Janina Morrison, the county’s chief physician of clinical services for public health. “Pharmacies and health care providers will be receiving orders directly from the manufacturers and will let their patients and customers know about availability.”
L.A. County health officials are urging people to get vaccinated as soon as possible. Cases and hospitalizations are continuing to creep up nationally and the threat of other respiratory viruses, including flu and RSV, loom this fall. For the first time, vaccines are available against all three.
“We know lots and lots of people who are vaccinated and then got infected,” said L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer. “That doesn’t change our reality that both that natural immunity you get from being infected and the vaccines themselves, that protection is waning over time. Study after study after study says that it wanes over time. We need to get ourselves boosted, we can’t afford to take the risk of getting infected.”
Ferrer said local cases have “somewhat plateaued,” but are still relatively high, having doubled in the past month.
“We’re not in a place where there are alarming increases in cases or wastewater testing,” she said.
Manufacturers say the tweaked mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer are effective against EG.5, the COVID strain that is currently dominant in the United States, as well as other…
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