Cal State Long Beach to vaccinate all students, faculty and staff
LONG BEACH, Calif. (KABC) -- Cal State Long Beach is dispensing COVID vaccines to all university staff, faculty and students.
The Long Beach Public Health Department gave the university 1,170 doses for the first round of vaccinations that started on Tuesday.
"Because of our size and the fact that we have health care providers here on campus, this could be a vaccination site to take care of the city within a city if you will of Long Beach state," said Jeff Cook, chief communications officer for CSULB.
The university is using public health guidelines to determine who will get the vaccine first, starting with those that currently work on campus.
"We'll then move to those who are older and who may have high risk conditions, and eventually our hope of course is to move down through the rest of our employees and into our students."
Matt Evans, a member of the IT staff on campus, said he's grateful to get a vaccine earlier.
"Pretty awesome you know cause everyone else is having difficulty in obtaining it," said Evans.
Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia says while the start of vaccinations is encouraging for reopening in-person classes in the fall, he says the university still needs thousands of more doses to vaccinate the more than 6,000 faculty on campus.
"The big issue right now is supply, so we just need the feds to get more vaccines out to the states and to the cities. Obviously we didn't have much of a plan a few months ago. Things are getting a little better now, but I expect over the next few weeks vaccine deliveries will start turning out across the country," said Garcia.
Cal State Long Beach is what's called a "closed pod," so only university employees and students will receive the COVID vaccine.
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