Not long after Florida began launching coronavirus vaccines, black leaders and others began to alarm that the first doses were reaching the arms of elderly white citizens who supported Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, while their hard-hit communities were left in the cold.
Now, some figures seem to support these suspicions.
Of the 34 states that shared vaccination data by race and ethnicity, Florida ranks last in the vaccination rate for black residents, even though the community has suffered a disproportionate share of Covid-19 deaths, concluded Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida.
Using the most recent data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, Jewett noted that while blacks make up about 15% of the state’s population and are responsible for 16% of Covid-19 deaths, the community received only 6% of vaccines so far.
“For equal vaccination for blacks, Florida is badly ranked 30 out of 34,” Jewett said in an e-mail.
Latinos in Florida were also vaccinated more slowly, Jewett found. Although they account for 27% of the population and 24% of deaths, they received only 16% of the vaccines, calculated Jewett.
“Part of the inequality for vaccines is simply because of the age gap” in the Florida population, said Jewett. “A much higher percentage of whites is over 65 compared to blacks and Hispanics whose population is younger.”
Still, Jewett said, “I think that, at first glance, that analysis holds up and is defensible.”
It also reflects the findings of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reported on Monday that blacks and Hispanics do not appear to be vaccinated across the country to the same extent as whites.
Preliminary data from the CDC, selected from about half of the 12.9 million people vaccinated in the United States from December 14 to January 14, suggest that blacks and Hispanics in the first groups to be vaccinated – long-term health and nursing workers household residents – received a smaller portion of the doses.
DeSantis, who did not respond to a request for comment on the apparent disparities in vaccination rates, last week pledged help from black churches to vaccinate more elderly African Americans.
“Churches that want to be involved in this program, we will absolutely work with them,” said DeSantis. “We can do this very quickly.”
This did little to erase the perception that DeSantis is making a policy of distributing vaccines and that people of color are being marginalized.
“I feel that Governor DeSantis is treating communities of color only as an afterthought,” said state deputy Omari Hardy, a Democrat whose mostly minority district includes parts of West Palm Beach and Delray Beach.
Nor, said Hardy, is he surprised by Jewett’s findings or the CDC results. He said the vaccine delivery system appears to have been designed to make it difficult for black elderly to vaccinate.
“I know many elderly people in my community who are struggling to get vaccinated,” said Hardy. “After making a fuss, the governor throws some vaccines at us in a church and then pats us on the back. This is not right.”
Charlotte County Democratic Party President Teresa Jenkins agrees.
“This is shameful,” said Jenkins when informed of Jewett’s findings. “It certainly confirms what we claim to be true – that vaccines go to whites-dominated areas first.”
Florida’s numbers “don’t lie,” said former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner, co-chair of the New York Vaccine Task Force on Vaccine Equity and Vaccine Education.
“When I compare vaccine implantation numbers between New York and Florida, what I see is a lack of understanding and attention to communities that needed more attention,” said Turner in an email response to several questions. “Local leaders made it very clear that the vaccine launch in Florida did not serve black, brown and poor communities well.”
CDC recommendations prioritized health workers and nursing home residents first, followed by frontline workers such as police, firefighters and teachers, and people aged 75 and over who do not live in nursing homes.
Elderly people aged 65 to 74 are in the third group, according to the CDC guidelines.
In Florida, however, DeSantis did not follow the CDC’s recommendations; he launched a “strategy for the elderly first” to first vaccinate members of one of the state’s most powerful electoral blocs.
Nearly half of Florida residents aged 65 and over have received at least one vaccine injection, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported on Sunday. But blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented in this group, the data show.
“Many of our residents are simply not being held accountable,” said Shirley Erazo, president and CEO of the Delray Beach Housing Authority, which serves a mostly low-income population to the West Palm Beach affiliate of NBC WPTV.
DeSantis has set up at least 19 vaccine centers across Florida, but the ones that caught the most attention and criticism were those that came up with little or no warning to local authorities in planned communities where elderly Republican residents predominate.
South of Tampa, in Manatee County, the sheriff, in response to a complaint from the American Civil Liberties Union, is investigating whether a county commissioner violated any law by helping DeSantis create a pop-up website in a community built by a supporter politician – who then got her name and that of the developer on the vaccination list.
Meanwhile, Florida agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried called for a congressional investigation into “alleged political favoritism” in the distribution of vaccines. And US Congressman Charlie Crist asked the Justice Department to investigate reports that DeSantis established vaccination sites “in select locations to benefit political allies and donors, about the needs of the most at-risk community and waiting lists in the county.”
Fried and Crist are Democrats who are considering running next year against DeSantis, a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump who, even before the vaccine was launched, was heavily criticized for taking too long to respond to the pandemic.
“Florida got it right, and the blocking states got it wrong,” DeSantis insisted over the weekend at the opening of the Conservative Political Action Committee in Orlando. “We look around in other parts of our country and, in many places, we see schools closed, businesses closed and lives destroyed. And while so many governors last year continued to arrest people, Florida raised people.”
As of Monday, Florida had reported nearly 2 million confirmed cases of Covid-19, along with more than 31,000 deaths, according to the latest data from NBC News. Most infections and deaths were reported after DeSantis declared in April that “we have not seen an explosion of new cases” and began to reopen the state despite objections from most health experts.
Jewett, a longtime Florida policy observer, said in an email that if he gave DeSantis a note for his way of dealing with the pandemic and the vaccine launch, it would be a C.
“For many Republicans and conservatives, they would give DeSantis an ‘A’ based on the same data,” he said. “From their perspective, health outcomes were average (and better than many states that had severe blockages) and he did it without mask mandates and allowed companies to reopen and operate and managed to reopen schools.”
Democrats and liberals, however, would give DeSantis an F “based on the same data”.
“From their point of view, health outcomes could have been much better if DeSantis had issued more regulations (or at least used its influence to encourage people to wear masks etc.) and DeSantis does not seem to care about equity in any way. some and the results reflect that to a large extent, “said Jewett.