One center will be housed in the Oakland Coliseum where the Oakland Athletics baseball team plays and the other will be on the campus of California State University, Los Angeles. Both will be adjacent to communities hardest hit by the pandemic, said Jeffrey Zients, President Joe Biden’s lead Covid-19 coordinator. The facilities will be staffed mostly with federal employees.
“These sites in California are just the beginning,” Zients said. “We are working with, in partnership, in states across the country to stand up new sites and will have more to say on that in the coming weeks.”
The effort is a change in course from the Trump administration, which left the administration of the vaccine largely to the states and focused instead on the logistics of shipping the vaccine. But after states became overwhelmed in the early weeks trying to manage the demand from people seeking the vaccine, Biden’s Covid-19 advisers urged him to take a more hands-on approach.
