“Shortly after we started getting this vaccination, I started asking for this data – I wanted, we needed, we were trying to get it and we were encountering problems,” Dr. Romero, who is also chairman of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said in an interview . He said that several state epidemiologists are working to “fill in the gaps by cross-referencing with secondary sources”.
Just as the pandemic revealed racial disparities in health care, it also exposed disparities in those being vaccinated. Blacks and Latinos are much more likely than whites to be infected and die of Covid-19. And in cities across the country, including here in Washington, wealthy white residents are lining up to be vaccinated in low-income black and Latin communities.
People in poor neighborhoods face a variety of obstacles, experts say, including registration phone lines and websites that can take hours to navigate and lack of transportation or time off work to get to appointments. And people of color, especially blacks, are more likely to hesitate to be vaccinated, in light of the history of unethical medical research in the United States.
The community health center program aims to close this gap. It will be relatively small at first; the government is allocating one million doses to only 250 of the so-called qualified federal health centers. There are about 1,400 centers operating in 13,000 locations serving nearly 30 million patients – about one in 11 Americans, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, which funds the program.
In general, the rate of vaccination is increasing, amid slow growth in supply, which remains a limiting factor. On Tuesday, the seven-day average of vaccine doses administered in the United States was reported by the CDC at about 1.49 million doses per day.
When Biden became president, the federal government dispatched 8.6 million doses of vaccine to the states each week. That number is about to rise to 11 million – an increase of 28%, Jeffrey D. Zients, Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, told reporters on Tuesday. This accompanies expected increases in manufacturing.
The one million doses for community clinics will be an addition to the supply that is being sent to the states. Separately, the White House announced last week that, on Thursday, the government will begin sending one million additional doses to 6,500 pharmacies.