Some health care workers have to wait for a Covid-19 vaccine.

With more than 12,000 Covid-19 vaccines arriving in Monterey County since early December, nearly all hospital employees have had the opportunity to be vaccinated. At Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula in Monterey, the first to be vaccinated on Dec. 18 were greeted with balloons and applause as they walked away from vaccination stations. A few tears of joy were shed by those overwhelmed by the historic event after more than nine months of treating Covid patients.

Within days, some in the local health care community were not feeling as joyous as reality set in that even though they treat patients face-to-face on a daily basis they won’t be getting the vaccine as quickly. While nearly all 3,300 CHOMP employees and doctors will have had an opportunity to be vaccinated as of Dec. 30 – including those who don’t interact with patients – doctors and health care workers who are not on staff at hospitals must wait.

“We are not in the vaccine loop,” says David C. Wright, an infectious disease specialist who runs a private clinic and lab in Pacific Grove treating patients mostly over age 65. “I see all kinds of people getting vaccines on TV who don’t even work with patients.”

Wright and others are questioning why they have to wait, as well as why hospitals like CHOMP can’t share. Brenda Moore, a spokesperson for CHOMP parent Montage, says they’re under a mandate to follow a complex phased, tiered and ranked system created by a state Covid-19 task force and vaccine working group attempting to mete out a limited number of doses. (The state in turn must follow Centers for Disease Control guidelines.)

Phase 1a, Tier 1 includes hospitals and long-term care facilities, along with psychiatric care and correctional facilities. Close behind are EMTs and dialysis clinics. Primary care clinics come under Tier 2, and private specialty clinics like Wright’s fall under Tier 3. Each facility must follow the same sort of system to prioritize workers from highest risk to lowest.

As to sharing vaccines with frontline workers who are not on hospital staff, Moore says Montage is “certainly open to playing a role in getting the vaccine to others beyond our workforce, but any such distribution would have to follow the state’s prioritization system and be subject to both vaccine supply and county authorization.”

Now that all four local hospitals have received vaccines, next come long-term care facilities, which are expected to begin vaccinations Jan. 4.