Tag: Latinos

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Health

Many Unvaccinated Latinos within the U.S. Need the Shot, New Survey Finds

Many Unvaccinated Latinos in the U.S. Want the Shot, New Survey Finds

About 18 percent of Latino respondents said they did not yet have permanent residential status in the US. Although the Biden administration and local health authorities have reiterated that the recordings are available to everyone regardless of immigration status, more than half of this group said they were unsure whether they would be eligible for the recordings.

Updated

May 16, 2021, 9:09 p.m. ET

Nearly 40 percent of all unvaccinated Latinos who responded to the survey feared they would need to show government-issued ID in order to qualify. And about a third said they feared the shot would endanger either their immigrant status or that of a family member.

Many health departments have been taking increasingly inventive steps to attract Spanish speakers and reassure them that their immigration status will not be jeopardized, said Erin Mann, program manager for the National Resource Center for Refugees, Immigrants, and Migrants at the University of Minnesota, which guides communities on best practices advises to reach underserved people. This includes language-specific drive-on lanes for tests and vaccinations, running events in the evening, and telephoning health care workers to sign them up.

The survey results come from a nationally representative telephone poll conducted April 15-29 of 2,097 adults, including 778 English- and Spanish-speaking Latinos.

The report of the results also examined the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Latino families, which explained their willingness to be vaccinated. About 38 percent of Latino adults said a relative or close friend had died from Covid-19, compared with 18 percent of white adults who said they had similar experiences. Two-thirds of adults in Latino said they feared either they or a relative could contract the coronavirus. Financial fears related to the pandemic have also plagued Latino families. Almost half said they had been economically affected, compared with about a third of white respondents who said so.

While about a third of non-vaccinated Latino adults wanted to get a shot as soon as possible, two-thirds hesitated and described themselves as waiting and seeing (35 percent) only when it was necessary for work (13 percent) or definitely not (17 percent). However, this group appeared to be accessible to incentive strategies, the report said. Better access would be helpful for them.

More than half of this group, overall hesitant and also busy, said they would get the chance if their employers gave them paid time off to recover from side effects, a rate almost three times as high like those of the white workers. (The Biden government has urged companies to take the action.) And 38 percent of that group would like to be vaccinated if their employer arranges for the shots to be distributed on site. Almost four in ten respondents said they would be more likely to get the shot if their employer offered a $ 200 incentive to do so.

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Business

Belief in pictures must be earned after mistreatment of Blacks and Latinos

Trust in shots needs to be earned after mistreatment of Blacks and Latinos

Dr. Torian Easterling is the First Assistant Commissioner and Chief Equity Officer for the New York Department of Health

There is one essential element to the success of a vaccination program: people’s trust in the vaccine and the institutions that give it. Trust in the Covid-19 vaccine is just as valuable as our vaccine supply. But after decades of racist divestment and medical abuse, the black and Latin American communities have every reason to be skeptical.

A recent CDC vaccine reluctance survey yielded disappointing – if not surprising – results. In September, 56% of black Americans said they would get vaccinated, and by December – after the FDA approved Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for emergency use – that percentage had dropped to 46%. By comparison, 70% of white Americans responded that they intend to receive the vaccine in December. Another Kaiser Foundation survey found a similar trend among Hispanic Americans that only 42% would like to receive the vaccine.

But more revealing in these polls is exactly why blacks and Latinos aren’t ready to get the shot. The main reasons were side effects concerns, the vaccine being developed too quickly, and many said they don’t trust the government.

It is clear that much remains to be done. To win the trust of New York Black and Latino people we need to be inclusive, reach communities, hear voices, values ​​and opinions. The responsibility cannot lie with the individual. It must be up to institutions and public health officials to treat people with respect so that they have a reason to trust and make informed decisions. Imagine we put our arms around communities and let them know we have them.

In the past few months, I have participated in dozens of listening sessions with ward groups, faith leaders, and local health care providers in black and Latin American churches. We talked about misconceptions and fears about the Covid-19 vaccine and how decades of racism and poor treatment by the medical community have created suspicion.

When comparing the medical experiences of Black, Latino, and White, the contrast is unsettling and begins literally from the moment we are born. As we know, there are persistent and intolerable differences in maternal health outcomes.

Unfortunately, the unequal treatment continues into adulthood. People of color are less likely to receive the same treatment for everything from palliative care to treating chronic diseases. In many large cities, there is also unequal access to quality healthcare and, often, hospital segregation.

In my own conversations with New Yorkers, trust in government and medicine has been an ongoing issue. And while they are painful, they give us the opportunity to move into a place of healing.

Last summer we heard the call for change when hospital stays and deaths in Covid-19 exposed the health impact of racism and the murder of George Floyd exposed structural racism in our country. The movement prompted the health department to declare racism a public health problem and the city to set up the task force on racial inclusion.

Now we are maintaining that commitment as we introduce vaccines to the city. To build confidence in the vaccine, New York City unveiled a share plan rooted in 33 neighborhoods with high Covid-19 case and death rates, and historical inequalities such as disease burden and crowded living conditions.

Our central topic is community-oriented public relations work at the neighborhood level. Townhalls and webinars provide information about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine. However, empowering people to make their own decisions needs to be done in small groups with trustworthy voices. That’s why we partner with hundreds of community-based organizations to be trusted ambassadors. We need to meet people where they are – on the phone, at home, online, or door to door – in the languages ​​New Yorkers speak. Communication must – and was – be open, honest and clear.

We also use data to inform our work. We sent a letter to health care providers across the city asking them to collect the race and ethnicity of the Covid-19 vaccine recipient and report it to the citywide vaccination registry. We’re releasing race and ethnicity data on Covid-19 tests and positivity, and we’ve just added postcode-level data.

We want to know who is receiving the vaccine and where there are gaps so we can get the vaccine to the right places. As the vaccine supply grows, we are working with community partners to identify the best locations for people to be vaccinated and to ensure connection with resources and services. The majority of our city vaccination sites are already in the 33 priority neighborhoods, but we are growing and prioritizing communities with longstanding inequalities that need the vaccine the most.

As we move forward with our vaccine rollout, racial justice will remain our most enduring core value. We know that we have to identify racism, take responsibility and do the necessary work to instill trust in everyday people for our vaccination strategy to be successful.

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Business

Albor Ruiz, a Journalistic Voice for Latinos, Is Lifeless at 80

Albor Ruiz, a Journalistic Voice for Latinos, Is Dead at 80

Albor Ruiz, a well-known Cuban journalist whose columns campaigned for Latino immigrants for The Daily News, El Diario and Al Dia News and demanded that the United States lift its long-standing trade embargo on his homeland, died on January 8 in Homestead, Florida He was 80 years old.

His sister, Enid Ruiz, said the cause was pneumonia.

Mr. Ruiz reached his largest readership at The Daily News in New York, where he was an editor for 23 years. the editor of his short-lived bilingual spin-off El Daily News; and a columnist who wrote with passion on immigration, politics, education, housing, art, literature and racism.

Mainly focused on the Queens borough and its vast range of nationalities, Mr. Ruiz wrote often about Latinos. But he also described people from other backgrounds, like the four Polish immigrants who were killed in a fire in an illegal apartment in the Maspeth area of ​​the district – reminding him of having fled illegally with seven friends in a small apartment living in Miami, Cuba in 1961 – and “accented people who speak loudly these days,” like Pauline Chu, a Sino-American woman who unsuccessfully ran for a seat on the city council in 1997.

People with “myriad accents,” he added, “added music to the sounds of New York.”

Sandra Levinson, the executive director of the Center for Cuban Studies in New York, said that Mr. Ruiz “cared about being an immigrant and identifying with everyone”.

Mr. Ruiz’s passion and concern for Cuba remained a foundation of his work. He wrote with cautious optimism in 2009 when President Barack Obama allowed Cuban Americans to visit them as often as they wanted. However, he criticized President Obama and Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for failing to end the 1962 embargo imposed by President John F. Kennedy.

Mr. Ruiz has returned to his homeland several times. In 2000, he reported on the intense battle between Cuba and the United States over custody of Elián González, who fled Cuba at the end of November 1999 as a 5-year-old boy with his mother who drowned on the way to Florida. Over the next seven months, Elián became the focus of dramatic clashes between the governments of the two countries and his relatives in Cuba and Miami.

Shortly after Elián’s return to Cuba in the summer of 2000, Mr. Ruiz described his personal connection with the boy he had campaigned for to retreat to Cuba. They were born in the same coastal town, Cardenas, and attended the same school.

“For the journalist who always tries to keep his distance from his topics and to report as objectively as possible,” he wrote of Cardenas, “there are still stories that play their emotional strings powerfully and sometimes make wonderfully happy music, sometimes terrible sad melodies. For me, the Elián González saga is one of those stories. “

Albor Ruiz was born in Cardenas on November 27, 1940. His father Ricardo ran a grocery store and his mother Micaela (Salazar) Ruiz worked there.

At first, Albor was satisfied with the Fidel Castro revolution. However, his political outlook changed in 1961 when his father was sentenced to five years in prison on unsubstantiated charges. Albor’s subsequent anti-Castro activities, which sentenced him to death in absentia, resulted in him and two friends escaping Havana in a 14-foot boat in November 1961, a 12-hour journey.

About a year later, Mr. Ruiz’s two sisters and two brothers came to see him in a rented house in Miami. “He met us at the airport and bought us everything we needed,” said Enid Ruiz in a telephone interview. “Even at 20 or 21 he was so responsible.”

Her parents joined her after her father’s term ended in Miami.

Mr. Ruiz graduated from the University of Florida with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1969 and earned a master’s degree in philosophy from the school a year later.

For the next decade, he taught English as a second language in Manhattan, philosophy in Puerto Rico and Spanish at Lehman College in the Bronx. He was also the manager of a bookstore and publisher specializing in Latin American books.

And he was part of a Miami-based group of Cuban exiles, the 75-member committee that helped negotiate and process the release of 3,000 political prisoners from Cuba in 1978.

In 1985 he moved to the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario, where he worked as an editor, columnist and news editor. He also served as the editor of two Hispanic magazines from 1990 to 1993 before joining The Daily News as an editor. After two years he was named editor of the El Daily News.

“It was very exciting,” said Maite Junco, the editor of El Daily News in the metropolis, over the phone. “That big New York newspaper put this paper out. It was very big for the Latino journalist community. ”

However, due to limited circulation and distribution problems, the paper was closed after five months.

After it closed, Mr Ruiz told the New York Times, “We feel – and I speak for the editorial staff – that we did our job and I think in that sense we don’t regret it.”

While at The Daily News, Mr. Ruiz developed a reputation as a newsroom mentor.

“Albor was always there and believed in me and told me I was a great reporter, often when I needed to hear it most,” Ralph Ortega, a former reporter for the Daily News, said over the phone.

Mr Ruiz remained on The News’ staff until 2013 when he was fired, but worked as a freelance columnist until 2016 when he was fired. He then began writing columns for Al Dia News, a weekly magazine, and continued through November.

He was inducted into the Hall of Fame for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in 2003.

In addition to his sister Enid, another sister, Lidice Lima, and his brothers Ricardo and Elián survive Mr. Ruiz.

Mr. Ruiz was also a poet. His first collection, “Por Si Muero Mañana” (“In Case I Die Tomorrow”), was published in 2019. In the title poem he reflected on his love for Cuba – where his ashes are strewn – and concluded:

Back to the ground, Cuban country
I am a foreigner and she calls me
Everyone knows that Cuba claims me
In case I die tomorrow

How translated it says:

Back to the ground, Cuban country
I am a foreigner and she calls me.
Everyone knows that Cuba claims me.
In case I die tomorrow.