Subscribe to the US Guardian Today newsletter
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that only 5.4% of coronavirus vaccine recipients were black, in their first analysis of how vaccines were distributed among different demographic groups in the first month of distribution in the United States. USA.
This is less than the proportion of blacks living in long-term care homes in the United States (14%) or working in the health care sector (16%). Both were in the highest priority groups for immunization.
However, the federal health agency emphasized that its analysis was hampered by the lack of data. While the 64 states and territories and five federal jurisdictions that performed the vaccination reported age and sex in almost all cases, just over half of the records included data on race or ethnicity.
“More complete reports of race and ethnicity data at the provider and jurisdiction levels are essential to ensure rapid detection and response to potential disparities in vaccination against Covid-19,” wrote the researchers.
More than 97% of the data that the CDC received contained information about age and 99.9% contained information about sex. However, just over half, 51.9%, of the data contained an entry for race or ethnicity.
In addition, the researchers said that the variation in state distribution plans weakened their analysis. States like Florida and Texas have rapidly expanded the vaccine’s eligibility criteria beyond healthcare professionals and the medically fragile, including many people over 65.
The CDC study analyzed data on more than 12.9 million vaccinations in the U.S. between December 14, 2020 and January 14, 2021. The period covers the weeks immediately after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorizes vaccines Moderna and Pfizer.
For recipients whose race was known, 60.4% were white, 11.5% were Latino, 6% were Asian, 5.4% were black and 14.4% reported multiple identities. Of those records, only 6.7 million had information on race and ethnicity.
Black people in the US died of Covid-19 at a rate 1.5 times higher than white people, and Latinos died at a rate 1.2 times higher, the Covid Tracking Project found.
Independent analyzes also found “red flags” in the race and ethnicity data that states are reporting. A recent report by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only 17 states were reporting this data. By comparison, 51 states and territories now report racial and ethnic data on deaths, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
Black and Latino people in the United States fell ill and died of Covid-19 at disproportionate rates, in part because of multi-layered disparities and decades-long policies that made these groups more vulnerable to Covid-19.
For example, black Americans are almost twice as likely as white Americans to develop type 2 diabetes during their lifetime, a risk factor for serious complications caused by Covid-19. At the same time, black and Latino workers are overrepresented in essential positions of low-income workers, where it is often difficult to distance themselves socially.
The researchers linked health disparities to several factors as systemic as housing segregation, which has already been institutionalized as a racist policy by the United States government, to factors as interpersonal as discrimination against health care providers.
Covid-19’s dramatic impact on blacks and Latinos in the United States reduced life expectancy at birth by two and three years, respectively, according to a recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In comparison, whites lost 0.68 years of life expectancy at birth.