Second shipment of H1N1 vaccines arrive

Tulare County received its second shipment of swine flu vaccines late Tuesday, and has distributed the allotments to the three area hospitals, local clinics and other health care providers. A third shipment is expected to arrive in the next few weeks.

“We think that it will be enough,” Allison Lambert, with the Tulare County Health & Human Services Agency, said. “We know that it won’t meet the demand that we have.”

The second shipment was supposed to arrive the week of Oct. 25, but a state mishap left many counties’ requests for the vaccines unfulfilled.

The initial shipment of 4,000 doses of intranasal vaccine FluMist for infants that arrived Oct. 8 did not include shots for adults or kids, leaving the Tulare County Health & Human Services Agency, as well as many Porterville area doctors, in anxious anticipation for its share of the state’s second allotment.

The second shipment is a 10,000 allocation of multi-dose injectables, available to high risk priority groups that include: pregnant women, household contacts and caregivers for children younger than six months of age, health care and emergency medical services personnel, all people from six months to 24 years of age, and persons aged 25 to 64 years who have health conditions associated with higher risk of medical complications from influenza.

Sierra View District Hospital, like Tulare Regional Medical Center and Kaweah Delta Health Care District, received 500 doses.

Sierra View, however, never received a portion of the first allotment.

“We haven’t begun vaccinating at this time,” spokeswoman Ramona Contreras said. “We don’t even know that we will have enough to accommodate the public.”

Dr. Ramon Resa’s Porterville pediatric office is in the process of giving the vaccines out to patients, and is maintaining a wait list.

“We ordered a lot, but we did not get what we ordered,” manager Shirley Rowell said.

-- Contact Jenna Chandler at 784-5000, Ext. 1050, or jchandler@portervillerecorder.com.