The Vaccination rate for People of Color is very bad. But many Black people want the vaccine. It is hard for many to find out how to get it. The messaging is terrible in underserved communities.
The bad is getting worse, owing to the fact that Black people represent more than 13.4% of the total population in the USA, and are receiving 6.6% of the vaccines, overall. There is some speculation that the Black Community is staying away from the vaccines. That they don’t trust the shots to be safe or effective. There seems to be little evidence of this in the Black Community itself.
Reports from sources like Kedren Community Center in Linwood, Los Angeles, CA, state otherwise. The Black community populations are denser in large cities, for generations. In many of the cities there is little access to media, other then what might be on television from local news. Much of the vaccination process, such as it is, is online, in social media, and on the web.
Kedren’s outreach has left media behind and gone back to a boots on the ground, out in the community, and going door to door. People are lining up for the walk in vaccinations, calling for appointments, and getting rides to vaccination sites in much greater numbers, then when they advertised online and in media.
The numbers for vaccines getting into Black arms is dismal. The chart below shows the rate of vaccinations.
The disparity is more than obvious. Even taking into account the lack of reporting on a daily basis, there are over 16,000,000 administered shots to the white population out of the 26,000,000 reported people who had shots. The Black community should be receiving 13.4% of those vaccinations, but are not even remotely close. The Black community received 1,700,000. The white population received their allotted 64%, but not one other group received their allotted vaccinations.
The disparity in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are so obviously apparent is it startling. 15% of the total deaths from Covid are from the Black population. That is (74,450). That is more then the rate of people represented by the Black Community in the country, just in population. The disparity in Cases can be seen in this chart
When you take the overall new cases, at 10.8 million, and you show by population rates, 59.8% of US population is white, 13.4% is Black, the infection rate is 55.9% for 59% of the population, while 12% is the infection rate for 13.4% of the population. 1.8 million Black people, of 42,000,000 is 4.3%. 6 million of white population is 188,000,000 is 3.1% – 4.3% of 42,000,000 is far more of the overall population, then 3% of 188,000,000 – this is not the same or close to each other. It means that the white population is far less effected by covid, then the Black population.
The overall vaccination rate was reported as 48,000,000 since inception, but only 26,000,000 were reported on so far. As the numbers stand now, and exponentially projecting out for case rates, the numbers double, but the percentages remain close to what they are now. More Black people are getting sick, faster, and more severely then the white population. But the white population is being vaccinated at 5X the rate of Black, and 4X the rate for Hispanic.
Don’t let the numbers fool you, 32% of vaccines for Black and Hispanic communities, is half of what the white community receives, while white community receives 64% of all vaccines. This is far more insidious than it seems, because we are getting only the portions based on a baseline instead of by the entire population, as laid out above.
The result will be that the white population will have nothing to fear and stop any attempts to manage SARS CoV-2. The rationale is others (other than white) get the disease, and we are protected. Even as cases start to climb again across the country, as people relax in response to being vaccinated. This is a messaging problem which will kill many hundreds of thousands, based on the infection rates of the new variants. Don’t stop managing this illness, wear your masks, social distance, and hand wash like crazy.
