“Those groups were seen and not heard - nobody thought about it.” Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “That’s what structural racism looks like,” said Dr. The vaccine registration information sent out to the hospital staff was not reaching them. Bell was horrified to discover that members of environmental services - the janitorial staff - did not have access to hospital email. Taison Bell January 5, 2021īut access issues persist, even in hospital systems. H/t: for the T-shirt idea #RightToBareArms □□ □ #ShotOfHope #BlackMenInMedicine /56jAu0V5zy- Dr. I’ll check in tomorrow to give an update. Some floated conspiracy theories, while other Black co-workers just wanted to talk to someone they trust like Bell, who is also Black.ĭose 2 is in! Just some mild arm soreness that will probably be worse tomorrow. Nurses he spoke with were concerned it could damage their fertility, while a Black co-worker asked him about the safety of the Moderna vaccine since it was the company’s first such product on the market. Taison Bell, a University of Virginia Health System physician who serves on its vaccination distribution committee, stressed that the hesitancy among some Blacks about getting vaccinated is not monolithic. Fola May, a UCLA physician and health equity researcher. “My concern now is if we don’t vaccinate the population that’s highest-risk, we’re going to see even more disproportional deaths in Black and brown communities,” said Dr. (Hispanics can represent any race or combination of races.) And non-Hispanic Black and Asian health care workers are more likely to contract covid and to die from it than white workers. The unbalanced uptake among what might seem like a relatively easy-to-vaccinate workforce doesn’t bode well for the rest of the country’s dispersed population.īlack, Hispanic and Native Americans are dying from covid at nearly three times the rate of white Americans, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis. But in every state, Black Americans were significantly underrepresented among people vaccinated so far.Īccess issues and mistrust rooted in structural racism appear to be the major factors leaving Black health care workers behind in the quest to vaccinate the nation. ![]() If the rollout were reaching people of all races equally, the shares of people vaccinated whose race is known should loosely align with the demographics of health care workers. The vast majority of the initial round of vaccines has gone to health care workers and staffers on the front lines of the pandemic - a workforce that’s typically racially diverse made up of physicians, hospital cafeteria workers, nurses and janitorial staffers. 14, compared with 0.3% of Black Pennsylvanians. ![]() In the most dramatic case, 1.2% of white Pennsylvanians had been vaccinated as of Jan. Subscribe to KHN's free Morning Briefing.
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