“Soon after we started this vaccination, I started asking for this data – I wanted it, we needed it, we tried to get it, and we found problems,” said Dr. Romero, who is also the chairman of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said in an interview. He said several state epidemiologists were at work “to fill in the gaps by cross-referencing secondary sources.”
Updated
Apr. 9, 2021 at 10:21 AM ET
Just as the pandemic exposed racial differences in healthcare, it exposed differences in vaccination. Blacks and Latinos are far more likely to become infected than whites and die from Covid-19. And in cities across the country, including here in Washington, wealthy white residents line up to get vaccinated in low-income Latin American and black communities.
People in underserved 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 a break from work to get to appointments. And people of color, especially blacks, are more reluctant to get vaccinated, given the history of unethical medical research in the United States.
The community health center program aims to fill this gap. It will be relatively small at first; The government is distributing a million doses to just 250 of the country’s so-called state-qualified health centers. There are nearly 1,400 centers operating 13,000 sites serving nearly 30 million patients – about one in 11 Americans, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration, which funds the program.
Overall, the rate of vaccination is increasing given the slow growth in supply, which remains a limiting factor. As of Tuesday, the CDC average of vaccine doses administered in the United States over seven days was approximately 1.49 million doses per day.
When Mr. Biden became president, the federal government was shipping 8.6 million doses of vaccine to states each week. That number is set to climb to 11 million – a 28 percent increase, Jeffrey D. Zients, Mr Biden’s coronavirus response coordinator, told reporters Tuesday. This corresponds to the expected increases in production.
The one million doses to the community clinics are provided in addition to supplies to the states. Separately, the White House announced last week that administration would begin shipping an additional million doses to 6,500 pharmacies on Thursday.
