SJ County rejected a grand jury s conclusion that the structuring of the health department hindered the public health officer s response to the pandemic.
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Getting a lucky break in both the crowd and the rain clouds, Howard Alonzo ducked under a blue tent and into a relatively short line at Jesse Owens Park on Wednesday afternoon. Hours earlier, hundreds of mostly Black and Latino Angelenos had been waiting there, hoping to get their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“My family members all came like a couple of days ago and got vaccinated,” he said. “Then I got a text message from them.”
Indeed, to find this site the newest in South Los Angeles you pretty much have to know someone who knows someone. Forget about scouring government websites or scoring secret access codes to the state’s joke of an online appointment system, MyTurn. Personal referrals, paper fliers and Google Forms are the go-to tools here.
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Will the Salton Sea power the future?
A swing set stands alone in the Salton Sea on Feb. 4, 2021. Photo by Shae Hammond for CalMatters
Could one of California’s biggest environmental problems end up being one of its biggest solutions? Today, a new state commission on lithium extraction will meet for the first time to discuss the treasure lurking beneath the Salton Sea, whose plumes of toxic dust blanket the Imperial Valley, a long-overlooked corner of the state near the Arizona and Mexico borders. The sea contains brine rich in lithium, one of the planet’s most prized elements used to manufacture electric-car batteries and other forms of energy storage, CalMatters’ Julie Cart reports. Companies mining the sea to produce geothermal energy are beginning to explore harvesting lithium there, too and California has already doled out $16 million in grants in the hopes of transforming the ailing desert into a juggernaut that will power the next century. But local residents wor
Miller said she was “bombarded” with messages from neighbors and friends who were able to get vaccinated at the event. County staff conceded they needed better vetting and a registration system in place during future events “(so that) only people with appointments get vaccinated unless we have excess doses,” said Greg Diederich, the county’s director of Health Care Services.
“Unfortunately, word got out, and it wasn’t our intent to hold an event that had not been publicly advertised and shared with everyone,” county Public Health Officer Dr. Maggie Park said. “Moving forward, my plan is that I’d like to only release vaccine to mass vaccination events only when there’s a registration in place. I don’t want 75-year-olds, 80-year-olds, sitting in a car for hours, or standing or camping outside when there could be an appointment.”