Fresno County health officials hoping to follow President Biden's recent vaccine claim

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- Local health officials say Fresno County will need to reach 50,000 vaccines per week in order to vaccinate all adults who are willing.

This week, Fresno County has 32,000 vaccine doses available.

"That's where we are looking at our planning, how do we increase our system to get to 50,000 by maybe and even above 50,000," says Community Health Division Manager Joe Prado.

Health officials are optimistic the Johnson and Johnson vaccine -- which recently received emergency use authorization from the FDA -- will make a big impact.

Though it's still not clear how many doses the county will receive, the allocation could be delivered later this week.

The health department is still working to determine which providers and people will be best suited to get the one-time shot.

In the meantime, Pfizer has stepped up its supply in comparison to Moderna. Frenso County is putting the doses to use.

About 11,000 educators and 15,000 food and agriculture workers were vaccinated this week.

"So those doses are going to continue to increase," Prado said. "We just need to make sure we have our distribution system inline to manage those doses and we are going to need to address the vaccine hesitancy in our community."

Fresno County Interim Health Officer Dr. Rais Vohra says with more vaccines administered, more data is becoming available to help with hesitancy.

"All of those are going to help people make that risk assessment, you know, which is worse, actually getting COVID and then risking getting hospitalized from it, or dealing with these side effects that are pretty well mapped out," he said.

Dr. Vohra says new, potentially more contagious variants of COVID-19 are throwing a curveball when it comes to returning to normalcy.