WASHINGTON — As soon as this city began offering Covid vaccines to residents 65 and older, George Jones, whose nonprofit agency runs a medical clinic, noticed something striking.“Suddenly our clinic was full of white people,” said Mr. Jones, the head of Bread for the City, which provides services to the poor. “We’d never had that before. We serve people who are disproportionately African-American.”Similar scenarios are unfolding around the country as states expand eligibility for the shots. Although low-income communities of color have been hit hardest by Covid-19, health officials in many cities say that people from wealthier, largely white neighborhoods have been flooding vaccination appointment systems and taking an outsized share of the limited supply. People in underserved neighborhoods have been tripped up by a confluence of obstacles, including registration phone lines and websites that can take hours to navigate, and lack of transportation or time off from jobs to get to appointments. But also, skepticism about the shots continues to be pronounced in Black and Latino communities, depressing sign-up rates.Early vaccination data is incomplete, but it points to the divide. In the first weeks of the rollout, 12 percent of people inoculated in Philadelphia have been Black, in a city whose population is 44 percent Black. In Miami-Dade County, just about seven percent of the vaccine recipients have been Black, even though Black residents comprise nearly 17 percent of the population and are dying from Covid-19 at a rate that is more than 60 percent higher than that of white people. In data released last weekend for New York City, white people had received nearly half of the doses, while Black and Latino residents were starkly underrepresented based on their share of the population.
And in Washington, 40 percent of the nearly 7,000 appointments initially made available to people 65 and older were taken by residents of its wealthiest and whitest ward, which is in the city’s upper northwest section and has had only five percent of its Covid deaths.“We want people regardless of their race and geography to be vaccinated, but I think the priority should be getting it to the people who are contracting Covid at the highest rates and dying from it,” said Kenyan McDuffie, a member of the City Council whose district is two-thirds Black and Latino. Alarmed, many cities are trying to rectify inequities. Baltimore will offer the shot in housing complexes for the elderly, going door-to-door.
(..)Dallas County’s rollout plans for the vaccine included an inoculation hub in a neighborhood that is largely African-American and Latino. But when the sign-up website went live, the link speedily circulated throughout white, wealthier districts in North Dallas.“Instead of getting a diverse sampling, we had a stampede of people who were younger and healthier than those who had initially gotten the links,” said Judge Clayton Jenkins, head of the Dallas County Commissioners Court. Observers told commissioners that those in line were overwhelmingly white.The county commissioners quietly contacted Black and Latino faith leaders in South Dallas, who encouraged constituents to show up for shots without appointments, as long as they offered proof that they were 75 and older.
(...) Even successful efforts to target impoverished neighborhoods are running into another problem. Many Black and Latino people are hesitant to get the vaccine.In Colorado, 1 of 16 white residents have received the vaccine so far, compared to 1 of 50 Latinos, who comprise 20 percent of the state’s population, according to a Colorado Springs newspaper, The Gazette.“There are a lot of Chicanos who are like, ‘I want to wait, I have questions, I need some answers,’ ” said Julie Gonzales, a state senator from Denver, who starts her workday sending condolences to constituents, many of them Latino, who have lost family members to the virus.Public health experts and outreach campaigns need to be attuned to cultural nuances that differ among Latino generations, Ms. Gonzales said. “It’s one thing to speak to an old-school Chicano who has been here for generations versus someone who is concerned about whether I.C.E. can find out their personal information if they try to get the vaccine,” she said, referring to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. (...) When initial statistics in Philadelphia showed that only 12 percent of vaccine recipients were Black, city health officials recoiled. Blindsided by an inexperienced start-up company whose vaccination strategies faltered, health officials also attributed the low numbers to hesitation among city nursing home workers and hospital aides, many of whom are Black.
