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Vaccine inequality
The pandemic has disproportionately harmed low-income communities of color, yet people from wealthier, largely white neighborhoods are taking an outsize share of vaccines.
In Washington D.C., a clinic that serves a largely Black population noticed an influx of white people when it began giving out vaccines. A sign-up link brought a stampede of people from wealthy Dallas suburbs to a site in a predominately African-American and Latino neighborhood. And in a Los Angeles neighborhood where 97 percent of residents are people of color, young white “vaccine chasers” from other neighborhoods have been camping out at clinics, hoping for soon-to-expire shots.
These anecdotes are backed up by early vaccination data. In Philadelphia, Black people make up 44 percent of the population, but only 12 percent of those who have been inoculated. In New York City, 24 percent of residents are Black, compared with only 11 percent of vaccine recipients. In Miami-Dade County, Black residents make up nearly 17 percent of the population, but they make up just 7 percent of vaccine recipients.
This pattern has complicated and deep-seated causes, but two of the biggest factors are access and trust.
The ramshackle vaccine distribution system favors people with resources — especially time, transportation and access to technology. And many Black and Latino people are hesitant to be vaccinated. They also have higher levels of distrust in the government and medical establishment than white people. In a recent poll, 43 percent of Black adults and 37 percent of Hispanic adults said they wanted to “wait and see” how the vaccine was working before taking it, compared with 26 percent of white adults.
Attempts have been made to rectify the vaccination gap with limited success.
Some cities have created door-to-door campaigns looking for eligible residents, while others have tried to restrict inoculations to people in their surrounding communities. But when Dallas County tried to limit vaccines to people from certain disadvantaged ZIP codes, Texas officials threatened to withhold the county’s vaccine supply.
Fighting vaccine skepticism among Black people may prove to be an even trickier problem. It will require a full-court press, argued Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in an opinion article in The Times. His suggestion? Start by allowing basketball stars to move to the front of the line if they are willing to get their vaccines on camera.
The New York Times