Friday: Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Thursday that all adults will be eligible for the vaccine by April 15.

By Jill Cowan

Good morning.

Well, the moment many of us have been waiting for has arrived: Californians 50 and older will be eligible to be vaccinated starting April 1 and residents older than 16 will be eligible starting April 15, state officials announced on Thursday, in an effort to reflect the increasing supply of doses from the federal government.

“This is possible thanks to the leadership of the Biden-Harris administration and the countless public health officials across the state who have stepped up to get shots into arms,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

Mr. Newsom said in a news conference that the state, effective immediately, would also allow health care providers to use their discretion to vaccinate family members of those who are eligible to be inoculated.

[Track the vaccine rollout state by state.]

According to current estimates, state officials expect that California will be able to get 2.5 million doses per week in the first part of April — a number that will ramp up to more than three million by the second half.

Currently, the state gets about 1.8 million doses per week. So far, some 15.7 million vaccine doses have been administered in California, according to The New York Times’s tracker, far more than any other state. But on a per-capita basis, that falls somewhere in the middle of states.

According to The Times’s vaccine tracker, an average of about 2.5 million doses per day are being administered across the entire country.

The announcement follows weeks of intense pressure on Mr. Newsom to speed up the state’s vaccine rollout, amid an effort to recall him. Experts have said his ability to fend off that campaign hinges on vaccinating millions of residents and lifting remaining restrictions, so that once residents are asked to vote in a likely recall election later this year, the state will be closer to back to normal.

Mr. Newsom has repeatedly blamed an unpredictable and limited supply for what has been criticized as a confusing and chaotic process that left many poorer communities of color behind.

Early this month, in response to that criticism, state officials abruptly announced that 40 percent of vaccine doses would be directed to communities designated as vulnerable according to a state index. The state also unveiled an accelerated reopening plan that was tied to those targeted vaccinations.

[Read more about the state’s reopening process.]

But that move frustrated local officials in the Bay Area, where almost none of those prioritized communities were located.

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