What a way for Sansum Clinic to celebrate its 100th anniversary year.
With Governor Gavin Newsom’s announcement last Wednesday that COVID vaccines would now be distributed to everyone age 65 and older, phones at Sansum’s 22 clinics throughout Santa Barbara County started ringing off the hook. Sansum was still scrambling to figure out the logistics to begin vaccinating its 12,000 patients who are 75 and older. The soonest that could start, Sansum CEO Kurt Ransohoff reckoned, was January 20. As far as the 65-and-up cohort, Ransohoff stated, “Just because the governor says something’s available doesn’t make it so.” The availability of vaccines, Ransohoff stressed, was “very tenuous.”
All that Ransohoff said early this Monday afternoon. By early Tuesday morning, the situation for Sansum and Ransohoff had grown much more tenuous.