Can America Close The Racial Gap In Vaccines?
The rates for Black Americans are way behind white Americans. Here's why and what officials in one city, Detroit, are trying to do about it.
America's vaccination campaign has, in most respects, been a mind-boggling success. But some population groups have fallen behind and one of them is Black Americans, whose vaccination rate is about 2/3 of what it is for white Americans.
Why is the gap so big? What can be done about it, what is being done about it, and how are those efforts going? My latest HuffPost article tries to answer those questions by focusing on Detroit, the city in my backyard where disparities of both race and class are on full display.
The article draws heavily on conversations with local officials, frontline workers and community leaders, as well as first-hand observations watching some programs in action. I also spoke to officials in the Biden administration.
The "all-of-government" campaign is by all accounts real, sincere and significant. But progress has been painfully, frustratingly slow. The White House announced last week week that more than half of all adults are now fully vaccinated. A top city official told me he hoped Detroit could reach the "middle or high 40s" by ... September.
Some initiatives are obviously working better than others. There's also a learning curve. Early on, for example, there was a lot of hope that mass vaccination clinics would boost rates among the traditionally under-served, including low-income Black Americans. But at Ford Field, the downtown football stadium here, more than 40% of doses ultimately went to residents of upscale, predominantly white Oakland County, while just 7% went to residents of Detroit.
The focus has since shifted. Federal, state and local officials are now concentrating on smaller, neighborhood clinics, and that makes a lot of sense. But there may not be enough of them yet, or at least enough with a predictable schedule. And even the clinics in operation aren't seeing that much traffic, mostly because skepticism/fear of the vaccine remains so high.
Note that the misgivings about the vaccine in Detroit are fundamentally different from the attitudes in places like Michigan's "thumb," where so many of the white, politically conservative residents don't take COVID-19 seriously.
Black Americans, by contrast, have watched COVID devastate their communities. But poor treatment at the hands of the health care system and medical establishment, over the course of generations, mean they don't trust the shots. As one city official put it, "You are not going to tear down the aftereffects of systematic racism in three months."
Still, there is some hope, or at least a silver lining. One of the most promising strategies for boosting vaccination is to offer it in the course of broader outreach efforts, to meet other needs in high poverty areas. Think housing, child care, food assistance, etc.
Those campaigns may help chip away at the inequality that made Detroit’s low-income residents, and their counterparts across the country, so vulnerable to COVID-19 in the first place.
Here's a link to the article:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/black-americans-vaccine-gap-covid_n_60a80516e4b0a24c4f7beb59
Thank you for reading!