Dentists and their staff are eligible for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine now.
That’s in the United States.
Dentists are urged to complete training at the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC to administer the vaccine.
In California, dentists are now eligible to receive the vaccine. The California Dental Association or CDA is advocating for dentists and dental teams to be vaccinated as soon as possible.
The California Department of Public Health recently issued a recommendation to make all health care professionals, including dental team staff, eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine now.
As local health departments ramp up mass vaccination efforts, there will be opportunities for dentists who have completed the required training to help in these efforts.
Dentists should complete CDC training to be eligible to administer the vaccine. The three-hour training is free and self-paced.
Meanwhile, the CDA is advocating that dental team members be vaccinated as soon as possible given the type of unmasked patient interactions dentists and their staff engage in.
And now that dentists have been approved to administer the COVID-19 vaccine in California, dentists and their staff must be vaccinated as soon as possible in order to join the front lines of the state’s vaccination efforts.
At this time, it is unlikely that dentists will administer vaccines from their dental offices due to storage requirements, billing questions, space requirements when monitoring patients after vaccine administration and lack of finalized vaccine administration plans in most counties.
As dentists complete the training to administer the vaccine, the CDA is advocating ensuring those who vaccinate first receive the vaccine themselves.
Meanwhile, California’s Orange County has announced it would be launching “Operation Independence” to help administer COVID-19 vaccinations.
Local vaccine points of dispensing will be brought online as they are approved, staffed and vaccines are made available. They are expected to dispense thousands of vaccinations daily once they are operational.
The first doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine arrived in Orange County in December, initially allocated to frontline healthcare workers. Vaccines have been dispensed to residents of skilled or assisted nursing facilities and other healthcare workers.
This phase also includes first responders, who began to receive the Moderna vaccine in late December, and law enforcement in virus hotspots.
That has been expanded to include home health care and in-home supportive services, community health workers, public health field staff, primary care clinics, specialty clinics, laboratory workers, dental and other oral health clinics and pharmacy staff.
The next phase will begin in February. It will cover ages 75 or older, those with underlying health conditions and those working in food and agriculture, education and child care.
It includes those working in emergency services; transportation and logistics; industrial, residential and commercial sectors; and critical manufacturing.
Those currently incarcerated and homeless will also be included./PN
