After the United States witnessed the highest number of deaths and hospitalizations of the coronavirus pandemic early in the new year, the infection rate began to decrease in early February. According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, over 26 million people in the U.S. have now been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 445,000 have died.
With several vaccines now being administered globally, a new threat has emerged in variants of the COVID-19 virus, initially found in the UK, Brazil and South Africa. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, says the next six weeks will be critical to vaccinate as many people as possible in order to suppress new, more dangerous mutations of the virus.
As Biden and congressional Democrats push forward with their plan to pass a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill which would include a third round of stimulus checks and funding to boost the nationwide COVID-19 vaccination effort, it’s become apparent that there’s a racial gap in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccinations. Data shows that Black and Latinx Americans are receiving disproportionately fewer vaccinations than white Americans. Between The Lines’s Scott Harris spoke with Dr. Robert Hecht, professor of Clinical Epidemiology at Yale University’s School of Public Health. Here, Dr. Hecht examines obstacles to equitable vaccine distribution here in the U.S. and in developing nations around the world.
DR. ROBERT HECHT: The fact is that the groups that have been vaccinated earliest in the rollout — the healthcare workers, the doctors and the hospital workers, the residents of the nursing homes — has tended to favor people who were better off economically and “whiter.” We’re not seeing people of color that are reached through those kinds of policies or algorithms. And this is why my colleague at Yale, Dr. Shan Soe-Lin and I wrote an article for the New York Times two-and-a-half weeks ago, calling for states to also focus in on and target communities that we call hotspots. A lot of these are immigrant communities where people have a blue-collar jobs. They get exposed to the virus working in stores and then as taxi drivers or Uber drivers through their professions. They live in very dense housing. Sometimes they can’t afford large places to live. So you get multi-generational families living in close quarters.
To deal with that, we need to really do two things. One, on the supply side, we need to make some of these mass vaccination sites more accessible to these hotspot communities. And we need to go in there with mobile and smaller local sites using clinics and pharmacies and other sites so that people living in these communities can get to the mass vaccination sites. And when they can’t make it, that something is available to them close to where they live. The other side of it is that we know that unfortunately, a lot of the misinformation, the anti-vaccination campaigns have been targeting these communities. There’s a lot that’s out there in social media and in other forms of communication in Spanish, Portuguese and other languages that are spoken in some of these communities and people are confused there and they’re hesitant to go and be vaccinated.
So if we’re going to really do something about equity, Scott, we need to both deal with this what I call the supply side, getting the vaccine there to the people who need it in these communities and then trying to work with local leaders and organized communications so that some of this misinformation is overcome and people feel confident that it’s safe and it’s desirable, and it’s going to be very beneficial to them to be vaccinated. If we do those things, then we’re going to see this inequity as you described it, reduced or even disappear.
SCOTT HARRIS: From the global perspective, what must be done to ensure that poor nations around the world where much of the population is mired in poverty, have access to vaccines, not just as a humanitarian gesture or priority, but also, I’ve come to understand that the world can’t overcome the pandemic if nations are left out of a comprehensive vaccination program. Could you say more about that?
DR. ROBERT HECHT: Until we try to protect and vaccinate people in other parts of the world, our own population is not going to be completely safe unless we sealed off our entire country, which is impossible. We’re such a large and important country. We live through movement of people. We have our diplomats and businesspeople and others who need to leave here and go to other countries. And we have people from other countries coming here. That’s part of the lifeblood of the United States. So in that kind of an interconnected world, we need to be concerned about vaccination and the COVID status of these other countries — the Senegal’s and Nigeria’s and Cambodia’s and other countries, Bangladeshes of this world. I don’t think there’s a problem in these places with either wanting to be vaccinated against COVID or knowing how to get the vaccination out there. The problem is they just can’t get access to the vaccines.
They’re all being bought up by the rich countries like the United States and the Europeans who have the money, the purchasing power. And right now there’s a kind of a vaccine nationalism going on where everybody maybe understandably wants the scarce vaccine supply. So the main solution I would say is trying to put together a fund to help purchase COVID vaccines for these countries that may not be able to afford them. And there is an effort underway. They’re called COVAX. But right now, it’s only raised a very small fraction of the money that’s needed. But we have a good model for this because a lot of these childhood vaccines against diarrheal disease, against cervical cancer, against pneumonia where the U.S. and the European countries, and some foundations put money into a common fund every year to help these poor countries to be able to afford these very valuable life-saving vaccines.
We just need the willingness of the rich countries to do so. And the amount of money involved is not that great. I think it’s estimated that to vaccinate everybody in some of these developing countries, we need to raise perhaps $10 billion, $20 billion. It’s not small change, don’t get me wrong. But when you see Congress working on a $900 billion rescue package and a $1.5 trillion package, and the same thing in Europe, if we only set aside a small fraction of the money that we’re putting into our own rescue plan, we could do a lot to help these other countries.
