Racial disparities found in COVID-19 vaccinations in Florida and elsewhere

Picture a raging fire in a city and speeding fire trucks with sirens going full blast are racing to the places where the flames are burning the lowest.

That, in effect, seems to be the case with COVID-19 vaccinations in Florida and all across America.

According to an analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the race to get Americans vaccinated against COVID-19 has left Black and Brown communities on the sidelines.  The CDC data shows that of those Americans vaccinated so far only 5 percent have been African Americans, 11 percent have been Hispanics, and 82 percent have been white.

These numbers matter because Blacks constitute an oversize percentage of the nation’s health care workers, who were put at the front of the line for shots when the vaccine rollout began in mid-December, andpeople of color are affected by COVID at far higher rates than whites.  Black and Hispanic Americans die at a rate of almost three times that of white Americans, the CDC says.

Florida, it’s always Flo-ri-duh!

In Florida, white residents are 3.8 times more likely to have access to a vaccination than Black residents. 
 
This isn’t to suggest that the state, health care providers, are intentionally shortchanging people of color.  But that, for a variety of reasons that is what has happened.

Over a month ago, Gov. Ron DeSantis, prioritized rolling out the state’s vaccine distribution plan through Publix Supermarkets, he in effect by passed local public health officials and worked with a supermarket chain whose primary business model is to avoid Black and Brown neighborhoods. 

So, the state’s recent decision to locate a vaccination center on the FAMU campus, somewhat of a course correction.

Clearly, one major obstacle is access. For instance, making reservations online for COVID shots is harder in communities where internet connections are more limited.

Another is convenience. If vaccination sites are not located near communities of color, people in those communities may have a harder time getting there, especially if they are older.
 
“The best public health happens when you go into neighborhoods and when you’re working with communities and when you’re addressing people who don’t have access to transportation or are homebound,” said Joneigh Khaldun, Chief Medical Executive, State of Michigan.
 
Then there is the question of trust, which dates back to the Tuskegee experiment. 
Public health experts say vaccine hesitancy is driving some of the racial gap, referencing polls suggesting Black Americans are more worried about getting the shots when the vaccines are still so new.
 
Some experts argue that focusing too much on hesitancy misses a larger point — that a lot more has to be done to get the vaccine into these hard-hit minority communities, at times and places where residents can access them.