Playing the vaccinations race card has only hurt Black Philadelphians
Guest Commentary: Playing the Vaccinations Race Card
As citywide vaccination rates driblet, a veteran political consultant reflects on the absurdity of the city'southward failed attempts at vaccine equity
Jun. 15, 2021
I am standing outside Lincoln Financial Field in South Philadelphia on a crisp February morn watching a press conference hosted by Councilmember Allan Domb and former Congressman Bob Brady. They are calling on Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney to deploy the urban center'due south NFL stadium as a mass vaccination site. Domb and Brady happen to be white men, and they are joined by 4 other members of Urban center Council—3 of whom are Black.
Every bit the printing conference gets underway, reporters start receiving the post-obit text from the mayor's spokesperson: "We ask Councilman Domb and other supporters this: Are you deliberately trying to ensure that white privileged suburban residents of other counties and states are prioritized for vaccination over Black and brown taxpayers of Philadelphia?"
FEMA and the White Business firm Covid-19 Task Force joined in this race-based line of reasoning in rejecting the push to utilize Lincoln Fiscal Field instead of opting for the Pennsylvania Convention Center, which is located in downtown Philadelphia. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said at the opening of the Convention Center mass vaccination site: "As we work to increase access to the Covid vaccine in communities across the land, we are prioritizing disinterestedness, because your socio-economical status, your race, your ethnicity, your access to transportation, or your clearing status should not impact whether yous are able to receive a vaccine."
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So, in Philadelphia our NFL stadium in South Philadelphia became a symbol of white privilege and our Convention Middle in Eye City became a symbol for racial equity. How did this work out for communities of colour? Turns out, not then good.
The Convention Middle site sits between the predominantly white neighborhoods of Middle City and the Asian neighborhood of Chinatown. Information technology should come as fiddling surprise that, in the latest reported data, the Asian population is at present the highest vaccinated demographic by race in Philadelphia—hitting 65 pct currently receiving one dose. Whites are at 50 percent, Hispanics 34 percent, while African Americans continue to lag at 31 percent.
It didn't help that in its offset five weeks of operation, our FEMA site at the Convention Center was only accessible through the city's registry, which happened to be 65 percent white. Only afterwards information technology came to low-cal that the FEMA site was exacerbating racial disparities in vaccination did the city begin to allow for walk-up vaccinations from targeted zip codes.
Simply even that didn't shut the gap citywide, so now the feds are changing up their messaging.
If you don't plan ahead of time to build out boosted mass vaccine channels for the Black and brown health deserts and then the pre-pandemic disparity will play out once again in vaccine distribution.
8 weeks after FEMA opened the Convention Center doors for vaccinations to "prioritize equity," Rachel Levine, assistant secretary for health at the U.Due south. Health and Human being Services Department (and sometime PA secretarial assistant of wellness), came to Philadelphia. Continuing in an almost empty Convention Center, she said, "at that place's always this tension between mass vaccination sites [and] the vaccination that you need to target toward specific groups for health equity."
At present it doesn't matter whether yous put the mass vaccination site in the middle of Middle Urban center on height of its major public transportation grid or in S Philadelphia, in that location seems to be something about beingness Blackness that is inherently at odds with mass vaccination sites.
Dr. Levine's shoot-from-the-hip narrative of an inherent tension between communities of colour and mass vaccination sites fuels a fell racial stereotype—that Blacks will not be able to figure out how to access vaccines if the mass vaccination site is non located in a Black neighborhood.
What is more racist: saying that Blacks will not go vaccinated unless you put the vaccinations at their doorstep, or proverb that Blacks volition non have the wherewithal to figure out how to get a potentially lifesaving vaccine at a 24-hour drive-in/walk-upwards mass vaccination site located at the city's NFL stadium.
The Blackness vaccine hesitancy narrative is nothing more a camouflage for the failure of elected officials to plan for mass vaccinating communities of colour.
Sharelle Barber, a social epidemiologist at Drexel University, told NPR that the assumption about hesitancy caused significant delays in getting vaccines to Black and Latinx communities. "That then puts the arraign on individuals and communities equally opposed to actually planning for activeness and equity," said Hairdresser.
When politicians play the race bill of fare with vaccine distribution instead of planning to mass vaccinate communities of color, it is those communities that get left backside.
And to exist articulate, Philadelphia'due south plan for mass vaccinations was really no plan at all. The "plan" was to simply put the vaccines in all of the pre-pandemic neighborhood-based vaccine distribution channels—pharmacies, hospitals, health systems, and federally qualified health clinics.
On the surface, that sounds like the fairest, nigh racially equitable approach: to non force communities of color to go outside their neighborhoods if yous're not going to force white residents to become outside of theirs.
Only what this approach misses is the reality beneath the surface; the reality of wellness deserts in communities of color. If you don't plan ahead of fourth dimension to build out additional mass vaccine channels for the Black and dark-brown health deserts—either within communities of color or outside of them tied to a robust public transportation organisation—and so the pre-pandemic disparity will play out again in vaccine distribution. That is precisely what'south happening to African Americans in Philadelphia.
The largest distribution channel in Philadelphia before the FEMA site coming online was our hospital systems. A just-released national study by the Lown Establish, a Boston-area wellness care think tank, found that the "Philadelphia expanse ranked among the metro regions with the about segregated hospitals, with 78 percent of hospitals falling either in the top 50 most inclusive or bottom 50 least inclusive—meaning their patients are disproportionately Blackness or white."
If the hospital systems were segregated, the vaccine distribution was going to exist segregated also.
The 2nd-largest distribution aqueduct pre-FEMA was the retail pharmacy chains. Notwithstanding, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, three months after vaccine supply entered the Philly market, "well-nigh 87 percent of Rite-Aid'due south doses went to white recipients, while just four percent went to Black ones."
None of this should take come as a surprise to the so-chosen experts running the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (PDPH) in the six months they had to plan for vaccine distribution. All the same no one—not the mayor, not City Quango, nor the PDPH—planned for this built-in vaccine inequity.
Philadelphia now attempts to redress this inequity by building pop-up vaccination sites in the health deserts information technology failed to cover in the starting time place. The city is now repurposing its 2022 demography outreach program to push vaccines in neighborhoods of colour.
However, this smaller-is-better neighborhood-based arroyo hasn't seemed to work either. From a high of 133,000 plus vaccinations administered the calendar week of April fourth, Philadelphia'south vaccination charge per unit for the by 3 weeks has dropped to 67,000, then 56,000, and almost recently 36,000 per week. At this charge per unit, nosotros may exist opening the Christmas Village at Metropolis Hall before Black Philadelphia reaches herd immunity.
We volition never know if a real plan to transport communities of colour to mass vaccination sites like Lincoln Fiscal Field would have prevented the racial disparity in vaccine distribution. We will never know if communities of color would have accessed this so-called symbol of white privilege if it was presented to them.
But we practise know this: When politicians play the race card with vaccine distribution instead of planning to mass-vaccinate communities of color, it is those communities that get left behind.
Ken Smukler is nationally recognized in the fields of campaign management, political applied science, and Ballot Twenty-four hours media programming. In 2018, Smukler was sentenced to serve 18 months in federal prison for violation of federal entrada finance laws. He is currently finishing work on his prison memoir, "The Jailbird Nutrition: Losing 100 Pounds and Finding Myself in Federal Prison house." This piece originally ran on smerconish.com .
The Citizen welcomes guest commentary from community members who stipulate to the best of their ability that it is fact-based and non-defamatory.
Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/vaccination-race-card/
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