POOR PLANNING ON HOW TO STOP VACCINE LINE-JUMPERS

 

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 9, 2021, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “POOR PLANNING ON HOW TO STOP VACCINE LINE-JUMPERS”

 

        There was a wide sense of relief when Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the other day that people aged 16 to 65 who suffer from certain severe underlying health conditions will be eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations starting on the Ides of March.

 

        Starting March 15, if you’re in a wheelchair, on a walker, need oxygen, take immune-suppressing anti-rejection drugs to preserve an organ transplant, suffer from coronary artery disease or heart failure or deal with chronic kidney or lung disease – you can sign up to get either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines shot in your arm.

 

        State health officials estimate this will add between 4 million and 6 million folks to the list of those eligible for shots – between 10 percent and 15 percent of all Californians. Overall, about half the populace will then be entitled to inoculations.

 

        That’s good, if supplies arrive. But planning for this phase has been less than good. In fact, the start of this new phase of the vaccine rollout figures to be about as confused as the opening of Phase 2, when people over 65 joined health workers on the eligibility list.

 

Back then – only about six weeks ago– Newsom proclaimed over-65s could begin getting shots and some grocery-based drugstores began Internet signups. But when those people turned up for appointments the next day, almost all were turned away. It developed there was no coordination between state and county health departments, so the drugstores could not give shots. This bait-and-switch affected tens of thousands of seniors. It wasn’t fixed until days later, a few hours after this column reported what happened.

 

        At the time there were no mass drive-through vaccination centers. There were few places to get vaccinated. The situation began to improve when some large testing sites quickly converted to giving shots.

 

        The planning flaw for the newest large expansion of the eligibility pool is different, affecting verification rather than availability – especially with more large centers opening across California.

 

        What’s undetermined now is how the soon-to-be-eligible will prove it. Most diabetics and folks with transplants don’t carry special IDs. Neither do heart attack veterans or kidney patients.

 

 

        In helping Newsom announce the new eligibility categories, state Health Secretary Mark Ghaly said his agency would spend the next four weeks figuring out what kind of verification would be used to keep imposters from jumping the line and getting vaccines long before their turn, along with the freedom and feeling of health security this brings.

 

        Like the confusion leading to the bait-and-switch of late January and the overloaded Web-based sign-up sites that followed, this problem was easy to anticipate.

 

        The real question is what health officials at both state and county levels were doing all fall, while awareness grew that coronavirus vaccines were about to arrive. Like most people, they knew that while some skeptics would refuse or delay getting vaccinated, the vast majority of Californians would eagerly accept the shots.

 

        In fact, the jabs quickly became the hottest commodity going. Planning for the phase-in was an obvious need, even while officials were also occupied with imposing shutdowns, lockdowns, masking, distancing and other anti-pandemic measures.

 

        But it did not happen, as was made clear by Ghaly’s admission that the state will develop seat-of-pants rules for folks to prove they are among the newly eligible. Will they need notes from their doctors, a la grammar school kids? Will their providers have to devise and hand out special cards to prove they have the conditions they claim?

 

        None of this will be much of a problem for patients at some of the state’s largest health care systems which did the requisite planning and possess the needed patient information. In the earlier phases, people regularly cared for by the UC Health system, the Providence hospital system and a few others were notified of their eligibility and invited via email to sign up for appointments. They’ll be OK in the new phase, too.

 

        Millions more will not have this benefit. They have no idea what documents, if any, they’ll need once they can start vaccination signups.

 

        It’s a plain dereliction of duty by Newsom’s administration, which knew this was coming but did not plan for it.

 

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

ZONING NULLIFICATION: THE END OF LOCAL CONTROL?

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 9, 2018, OR THEREAFTER


BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “ZONING NULLIFICATION: THE END OF LOCAL CONTROL?”

        Gov. Jerry Brown, a former mayor of Oakland who often griped about state government’s interference with local issues, ran in 2010 on a platform of stronger local control. He’s delivered on that for the most part, with the strong exception of pet projects like high speed rail and his putative water tunnels water project, both facing strong opposition from people and local governments in their direct paths.

        But now cities and counties around the state face the strong possibility of a new law that would essentially nullify local land use and zoning plans crafted through years of public hearings and detailed analysis.

        This comes in the guise of fighting homelessness and California’s severe housing shortage, which has contributed to driving up rents and real estate prices to the point where many California employers have trouble retaining workers because they can live elsewhere much more cheaply.

        The proposed plan takes the form of a state Senate bill sponsored by San Francisco Democrat Scott Wiener that would essentially take all zoning and land use authority away from cities and counties in areas close to mass transit.

        Known as SB 827, this bill would prevent localities from regulating housing construction within half a mile of a light-rail train station or within one-quarter mile of a frequently used bus route. Those rules would cover about 95 percent of the area of some cities. They would also mandate housing density seldom seen outside the downtown areas of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, setting minimum heights of 45 feet to 85 feet in such areas and making eight-story high-rise buildings standard in many parts of California.

        This plan already has the backing of many high-tech moguls, including the CEOs of companies like Salesforce, Twitter, Lyft, Yelp and Mozilla, all headquartered in or near San Francisco. A corps of 130 tech executives and their venture capital backers signed a letter this winter griping that “the lack of homebuilding in California imperils our ability to hire employees and grow our companies.”

        But few of those executives live in areas likely to be impacted by the proposed rules. There are few rail stations or heavily-used bus lines in places like Hillsborough, Los Gatos and leafier areas of San Francisco like St. Francis Wood and Sherwood Forest.

        The Wiener bill draws strong opposition from residents and governments in places as geographically diverse as Mill Valley and Santa Monica.

        One Marin County blogger described the measure as “draconian,” because it would “remove local control of zoning and planning.”

        It could do that, if passed in its present form. Passage seems possible since the bill will have backing from powerful forces including developers and building trade unions.

        But the reasoning behind it is fundamentally flawed. For example, Wiener would make objections to projects on the grounds of vastly increased traffic irrelevant, presuming that proximity to mass transit prevents most new traffic problems and congestion.

        But new figures from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Southern California demonstrate that’s not so. Despite introduction of billion-dollar new light rail lines over the past five years, ridership on buses and trains in the region was down 15 percent last year from levels of five years earlier. That represented a drop of 72 million trips. Yes, the new lines led to rail ridership increases – up 4 million, but that was far lower than the reduction in bus trips.

        At the same time those lines were added, so were numerous apartment buildings near them. This has neither cut road traffic nor led to increased mass transit ridership, as planners often assume it will.

        So the prevailing reasoning among planners seeking greater housing density is false. They’re wrong to believe Californians will easily abandon their cars.

        This is also a major part of the reasoning behind Wiener’s proposal.

        Because of its flawed logic, this measure would likely cause at least as many problems as it solves.

        “California’s housing shortage is a threat to our economy,” Wiener told a reporter, insisting his plan can fix things. But even the mayor of ultra-liberal Berkeley objects, calling it an “extreme reactive approach” that would lead to more teardowns of existing housing and more evictions of longtime residents.

        In short, this plan amounts to pure panic in the face of a problem. And panic rarely produces good results.

       

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

EDUCATION ACCESS ABOUT TO SHRINK

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, MARCH 9, 2012 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“EDUCATION ACCESS ABOUT TO SHRINK”

Just in case anyone doubts that repeated, seemingly perpetual state budget crises don’t have real-life effects on ordinary citizens, check out what’s already happened and what’s about to happen to education at almost every level in California.

Once the world’s best public school system, with access to classes guaranteed from kindergarten at age 5 and on throughout a lifetime, education in California has been severely truncated and is about to get even more limited.

The effects may be most strikingly noticeable at the community college level, where classes have long been available to all comers at nominal costs that verged on free. This enabled Californians to learn about everything from computers to ceramics, from engineering to energy as long as they wanted to keep on studying.

But budget crunches that knocked almost $1.4 billion from higher education funding over the last two years have changed a lot of that. For one thing, it now costs $26 per credit to take a junior college class, meaning a few months of an ordinary four-unit course in speechmaking or astronomy now runs more than $100, with a hike to $36 per credit likely to come soon.

The cash crunch has cost community colleges more than $500 million and reduced faculty at most of the state’s 112 campuses to the point where the system’s board of governors voted this winter to give full-time and first-time students priority in class registration. Those who take part in college orientation and develop formal educational plans will also go to the head of the line, as will students who begin taking remedial classes in their first junior college year.

That more or less leaves out adult students who long have taken up class slots, along with students who have not demonstrated they are serious about getting an A.A. degree and transferring to a four-year university.

Before those rules were accepted by the community college board (they still need legislative ratification), hundreds of students protested that – combined with higher tuition – they will drive away poor students who can’t afford enough units to stay on a fast track to transfer, even if they are serious about education.

But junior colleges aren’t the only ones with less accessibility under current plans. Even with some cuts restored in the last few weeks, hundreds of rural elementary and high schools will suffer reduced school busing. The state does not require districts to have home-to-school busing, but probably should. In many places, if there’s no bus, there’s no way for children to get to school.

School districts spent more than $1.2 billion on busing two years ago, with the state covering just 38 percent of the tab. Triggered cuts that took effect at the end of 2011 cut that support in half, meaning in many places late buses that allowed students to participate in athletics and other enrichment activities have stopped running. Some of the support is now back, but cuts in busing will be far more severe next year, if Brown’s plan to reduce funding further stands up.

There will also be some radical changes in how state money is distributed to schools. Brown’s plan would give $3,000 per year per student more to school districts where 90 percent of students are either low-income or English learners than to districts where students with these problems are less numerous.

That could mean enormous cuts for large districts like Los Angeles and San Francisco, whose curricular offerings would then plummet. So might their academic performance.

This Brown tactic vastly increase the effects of the 1971 Serrano v. Priest court decision that now mandates higher funding for schools in the economic lower half of all districts. That measure, meant to boost performance by poor children, has actually had a different effect – making almost all schools mediocre, except those that get extra funding from parents, local businesses or generous city governments.

Yes, some disadvantaged students might be helped by all these changes at many levels of public education. But there’s no reason to believe the overall effects will be positive for most, and plenty of historic precedent indicating the results will again be mediocre at best.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.

POIZNER SOUNDS LIKE HE'S CHANNELING JOHN PAUL JONES

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, MARCH 9, 2010, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

“POIZNER SOUNDS LIKE HE'S CHANNELING JOHN PAUL JONES”

Listen to Steve Poizner talk about his underdog run for the Republican nomination for governor, and it’s almost as if he’s channeling John Paul Jones, the naval hero of the Revolutionary War.

Poizner’s campaign, now mired more than 30 points behind former eBay chief Meg Whitman in every poll, is listing and might be taking on water, just as Jones’ frigate, the USS Bon Homme Richard, did during its sea battle against the British warship Serapis in the summer of 1779.

Like the captain of Serapis, Whitman’s chief consultant Mike Murphy feels his opponent might as well admit defeat. He offered in a now-infamous email to “clear the field” for Poizner in the 2012 Senate race if Poizner would surrender to Whitman. And former Gov. Pete Wilson, Whitman’s campaign chair, a few days later allowed that the general election campaign has begun, implying the primary election is over three months before the vote.

Poizner’s response to Whitman’s call for him to drop out amounts to precisely the same defiant thing Jones told the British captain: “I have not yet begun to fight.”

“I know a lot of people want the battle to start,” said Poizner, who is sitting on an $18.5 million war chest made up primarily of his own cash. The current state insurance commissioner, Poizner made a fortune estimated at as much as $1 billion by founding and later selling two Silicon Valley high tech companies.

“Meg clearly doesn’t want to be in a Republican primary,” Poizner said in an interview. Offered an opportunity to speak about her own campaign during an encounter after one of her recent stump speeches, Whitman declined and scurried away. Poizner, by contrast, was eager to talk.

“She wants to be in a general election because in a primary, she will have to answer for the money she gave to (Democratic Sen.) Barbara Boxer and to extremist environmental organizations,” Poizner said. He noted that Whitman, who has called for suspension of court orders limiting pumping of water from the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers in order to save endangered minnow-like delta smelt, contributed $300,000 to the Environmental Defense Fund, which aggressively sought those court orders. Farmers and cities in the San Francisco Bay area and south of the Delta cite the orders as a cause of unemployment and “man-made” drought.

“Essentially, she helped an organization that helped cut off water to cities and agriculture,” Poizner said.

He has yet to point out any of this to the great mass of Republican voters, but Poizner insists he will.

“I will run a very aggressive campaign,” he insisted, acknowledging that fellow billionaire Whitman, who has so far invested 39 million of her own dollars in her effort, has outspent him dramatically and bought herself that big poll lead via a months-long onslaught of radio and TV commercials.

“Just because she spends a fortune does not mean she has spent it wisely,” Poizner asserted. “Her ads are so vague that people know almost nothing about her. We will start our own ads at the right time, when people are ready to pay attention. Our polling shows that 50 percent of Republican voters are not even close to having an opinion yet. By the time this campaign is over, they will know who is the real conservative. They will also know she has consistently refused to debate me and that she would like to run her campaign from her living room. The fact is that people who might be supporting her now are responding only to her commercials, and that’s a very shallow base.”

Poizner admits his campaigning as a self-described “true conservative” represents some change from when he ran unsuccessfully in 2004 for the state Assembly from a liberal-leaning district on the San Francisco Peninsula. But he insists he’s completely consistent on many key issues.

“I was pro-choice (on abortion) then and I’m pro-choice now,” he said. “I was against gay marriage then, too, but for domestic partners. But as I’ve worked in Sacramento, I’ve become more passionately against tax increases and for cutting government spending. I’ve seen state government in action and that has shaped my thinking.”

Poizner insists he will beat Whitman in June because “There will be a small turnout and conservative Republicans will vote for a conservative with a track record. That’s me.”

But if he does win, will his campaign suffer the same fate as Jones’ ship, the Bon Homme Richard, which sank not long after Serapis surrendered? Will Poizner be easy pickings for Democrat Jerry Brown?

No, he insists. “About 90 percent of the voters think we are on the wrong track in California and being a career politician will make it difficult for him to win against someone who has a strong record and can solve problems.”

Stay tuned.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net