People wait outside a COVID-19 vaccine distribution center at Kedren Community Health Center on January 28, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
The White House will begin sending doses of Covid-19 vaccines directly to federally qualified community health centers next week to expand reach to traditionally underserved communities, announced the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator, Jeff Zients, on Tuesday. -market.
Along with other initiatives, such as federally supported mass vaccination sites and mobile clinics, the new program will seek to ensure equal distribution of the vaccine, said Zients.
“Equity is central to our strategy to put this pandemic behind us, and equity means that we are reaching everyone, particularly those in underserved and rural communities,” said Zients. “But we cannot do this effectively at the federal level without our partners at the state and local levels sharing the same commitment to equity.”
Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, president of the White House’s Covid-19 Health Equity Task Force, noted that there are more than 1,300 community health centers across the country, serving nearly 30 million people.
“Two-thirds of their patients live on or below the federal poverty line, and 60% of patients in community health centers identify themselves as racial or ethnic minorities,” she noted. “Equity is our northern star here. This effort that focuses on direct allocation to community health centers really has to do with connecting with hard-to-reach populations across the country.”
At the launch of the program, the White House plans to send doses to at least one center in each state, with 1 million divided between 250 centers in the coming weeks, said Nunez-Smith. She noted that the government is working simultaneously to increase public confidence in vaccines, “which we know is less in underserved communities than the national average”.
The announcement of the community health center program comes after the launch of the pharmaceutical retail program, in which the federal government is starting to send doses directly to a few hundred pharmacies across the country. Nunez-Smith said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working with participating pharmaceutical companies to ensure that they reach “socially vulnerable areas”.
The government also announced that it is once again increasing the number of doses it sends to the states weekly. The federal government will now send 11 million doses to the states every week, compared with 8.6 million it sent three weeks ago, Zients said.
“This is a total 28% increase in vaccine supply in the first three weeks,” he said.
Asked if there is an inevitable trade-off between equity and speed of delivery of the vaccine, Zients said, “I don’t accept this premise at all.”
“I think we can do this in a fair, equitable and efficient way,” he said. “So efficiency and equity are central to what we’re doing, and I don’t see any compensation between the two. I think they go together.”