Less than a quarter of Black Americans have received their first Covid-19 shot, which is less than other racial and ethnic groups tracked by the CDC.
Reaching the most vulnerable populations was key to a successful Biden administration Covid vaccination campaign. But more than five months in, the blueprint that has worked with other ethnic and racial groups has not been successful enough to win over Black Americans.
Less than a quarter of Black Americans had received their first Covid-19 shot as of June 7 based on available federal data, amid a period of stagnation that has slowed the government’s ramped-up effort to accelerate vaccinations and reach the nation’s most vulnerable communities.
Black Americans are behind the pace set over the past month by other racial and ethnic groups tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The poor trend worries health officials and experts who say the immunization drive is running into a particularly complex web of distrust, outreach challenges and stubborn barriers to access.
“It’s a tough layer that we have to address — it requires relationship building and it’s going to take a little longer,” said Octavio Martinez, executive director of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, who sits on the White House’s Covid-19 Health Equity Task Force. “We have a systemic issue here.”
One of the task force’s first assignments was recommending ways to build trust in the vaccines and effectively roll them out to those marginalized communities — chief among them Black Americans who are dying from Covid-19 at disproportionate rates. Some early ideas were incorporated into the administration vaccination plan crafted within the White House, task force members said. Yet despite the panel shifting its focus to other, long-term health equity issues in recent months, vaccine disparities have persisted.
“We still have some places where the past history of bias, discrimination and hate has just caused such an ingrained mistrust of political and social structures that it’s hard to break through that,” said James Hildreth, CEO of Meharry Medical College and a task force member. “We need to make a stronger effort to bring the vaccine to the communities, rather than relying on the communities to come to vaccination centers.”
The administration anticipated that vaccinating minority groups and other hard-to-reach populations would require a concerted effort, prompting it to assign several Covid-19 response officials to focus on equity issues, in addition to creating the outside task force. The administration and public health experts believe that many members of the groups aren’t openly hostile to vaccines, but need reassurance and prodding to get the shots.
The White House has intensified the equity push in the past month in particular, as it races to hit President Joe Biden’s July 4 deadline for getting 70 percent of U.S. adults to take at least one dose of a Covid vaccine.
“It’s a tough layer that we have to address — it requires relationship building and it’s going to take a little longer,” said Octavio Martinez, executive director of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, who sits on the White House’s Covid-19 Health Equity Task Force. “We have a systemic issue here.”
One of the task force’s first assignments was recommending ways to build trust in the vaccines and effectively roll them out to those marginalized communities — chief among them Black Americans who are dying from Covid-19 at disproportionate rates. Some early ideas were incorporated into the administration vaccination plan crafted within the White House, task force members said. Yet as the panel has shifted its focus to other, long-term health equity issues in recent months, vaccine disparities have persisted.
“We still have some places where the past history of bias, discrimination and hate has just caused such an ingrained mistrust of political and social structures that it’s hard to break through that,” said James Hildreth, CEO of Meharry Medical College and a task force member. “We need to make a stronger effort to bring the vaccine to the communities, rather than relying on the communities to come to vaccination centers.”
That initiative has shown signs of success. Over the last two weeks, Hispanic Americans accounted for more than a quarter of total vaccinations, CDC data show, a sharp acceleration from just a month ago, when they ranked as the least-vaccinated demographic group. Asian Americans over that period have also accounted for a greater share of shots, compared with their proportion of the overall population.
“I have seen a real explosion in the Hispanic community being reached out to in their own language,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, adding that the challenge in the Black community has been finding both the most effective messengers and approaches. “The things that have created disparities in the first place, we have fixed some of them. But not all of them, and not to a large enough degree.
The White House is bearing down on making the vaccines easily accessible, hoping that by promoting the shots in as many ways as possible, through as many channels as possible, it can gradually close the vaccination gap within the Black community in the process.
“As this is no longer affecting mainstream white Americans, it’s not going to get the same media attention and people are going to think that means the problem is over,” said Celine Gounder, who advised Biden on the Covid-19 response during the transition. “It’s going to be a replay of what we saw at the beginning of the pandemic, where those most vulnerable communities are going to be the ones that continue to suffer the most.”
Regardless of whether the administration hits its 70 percent mark nationally, there remains lingering concern that without significant progress in vaccinating Black people, the virus could continue circulating within the community for months. The outcome would be that Black Americans would face disproportionate caseloads after the rest of the U.S. has moved on, and put them at greater risk if new, more contagious strains emerge later this year.
Biden acknowledged fears of the vaccine and shared a reminder that the burden of hospitalizations and deaths would increasingly fall on the dwindling number of unvaccinated people.
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