Kaiser Permanente, which provides health service for a wide cross section of those in San Bernardino County, is no longer providing its members residing in Rancho Cucamonga, where it has medical facilities, and in San Bernardino, where it has medical facilities, with COVID vaccinations.
Those seeking the shots are turned away at the door and told that they can try to see if they can get an immunization in Fontana or in Palm Springs.
Kaiser officials did not explain why they are discontinuing the injections, other than to say the policy was effective last week.
The move comes as California is experiencing another coronavirus surge. Since the onset of the pandemic in February 2020, a pattern of summer and winter surges has been shown. There was a summer surge in 2020, a surge in the winter of 2020, one again in the summer of 2021 and then again in winter 2021, with spikes in infection rates and deaths. With the official opening of summer yet more than three weeks distant, California is reporting more confirmed cases per day than it did at the peak of the summer 2020 surge, and it is inching up toward summer 2021 surge levels.
There has been mutation of the disease in what epidemiologists detect as a series of strains of the malady over the last two years and four months. Typically, variants evolve and initially lay low and then come to the fore to become dominant. The variant that’s dominant right now, an offshoot of the Omicron strain, is extremely contagious, though it seems to provoke less severe symptoms and is not, perhaps, as deadly as previous forms of COVID-19, according to epidemiologists.
One factor in the reduced mortality rates is that higher rates of immunity from vaccination or past infections are protecting people who contract the newest permutation of the disease. What is not charted so far is whether those completely unvaccinated or who have no immunity based upon a past bout with a different strain will have resiliency against the disease in its most recent form or whether they are more likely to perish from their infection than that portion of the population that has immunity either because of being inoculated or having experienced the coronavirus previously. While a significant number of people were and remain resistant to getting vaccinated, the main contingent of medical professionals see no hazard in the vaccinations. They have been encouraging people to get vaccinations and follow-up booster shots to reduce the numbers of people in whom the disease will flourish and thereby mutate. Those advocating and pursuing that strategy have warned that having a large segment of the population unvaccinated will create pockets of people in whom the mutation of the disease will take place, giving constant and continuous rise to new and more strains of the disease, some which will be even more deadly offshoots than what has been seen before.
For that reason, Kaiser Permanente’s abrupt discontinuation of the policy of providing vaccinations to those who were willing to undergo them is baffling. Reportedly, the U.S. Government has paid for the production and provision of the vaccine, such that Kaiser Permanente’s only cost in vaccinating its members extends to employing its medical personnel to administer the shots. When Kaiser plan members offered to go beyond their normal co-pay for medical service and outright pay for the vaccinations, Kaiser Permanente is still refusing that service to those who live in San Bernardino and Rancho Cucamonga. The vaccination is not available at any price to those who live in those two cities.
-M.G.