People are waiting outside a COVID-19 vaccine distribution center at the Kedren Community Health Center on January 28, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
The White House will begin delivering doses of Covid-19 vaccines directly to federally qualified community health centers next week to expand access to traditionally served communities, Covid-19 White House Response Coordinator Jeff Zients said Tuesday.
Along with other initiatives, such as federally-supported mass vaccination sites and mobile clinics, the new program will seek to ensure equity in vaccine launch, Zients said.
“Equity is key to our strategy to put this pandemic behind us, and equity means reaching everyone, especially those in rural and underserved communities,” Zients said. “But we can’t do this effectively at the federal level without our local and state partners sharing the same commitment to equity.”
Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, president of the White House Covid-19 Health Equity Task Force, noted that there are more than 1,300 community health centers across the country, serving nearly 30 million people.
Two-thirds of their patients live at or below the federal poverty line, and 60 percent of patients in community health centers identify as racial or ethnic minorities, she noted. Equity is our North Star here. This effort, which focuses on direct allocation to community health centers, is indeed the link with those hard-to-reach populations across the country.
In launching the program, the White House plans to send doses to at least one center in each state, with 1 million divided between 250 centers in the coming weeks, Nunez-Smith said. She noted that the government is working simultaneously to increase public confidence in vaccines, “which we know is lower in disadvantaged communities than for the national average.”
The announcement of the community health center program comes after the launch of the retail pharmacy program, in which the federal government begins sending doses directly to several hundred pharmacies across the country. Nunez-Smith said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention works with participating pharmaceutical companies to ensure they reach “socially vulnerable areas.”
The administration has also announced an increase in the number of doses it sends to states each week. The federal government will now send 11 million doses to states each week, up from the 8.6 million it sent three weeks ago, Zients said.
“This is a total 28% increase in vaccine supply in the first three weeks,” he said.
Asked if there was an inevitable trade-off between the fairness and speed of vaccine distribution, Zients said: “I do not accept this premise at all.”
“I think we can do this in a fair, equitable and efficient way,” he said. “So efficiency and fairness are both essential to what we do and I don’t see any compromise between the two. I think they go hand in hand.”
Confidence in the vaccine has risen among American adults, but some demographics have shown higher levels of hesitation than drugs, according to a new CDC released Tuesday. Nearly half of adult Americans surveyed in December said they were absolutely certain or very likely to get vaccinated against Covid-19, an increase compared to September’s responses, according to the study.
Younger adults, women, blacks, people living in suburbs or rural areas and those with less education were more likely to say they did not want the vaccine. People on lower incomes and those without health insurance were also more likely to say they did not intend to get vaccinated, the researchers said.
A separate CDC study released Feb. 1 found that most of the nearly 13 million people who received at least one photo of a Covid-19 vaccine in the first month of drug distribution were women, 50 years old. or over and probably non-Hispanic and White. Just over half of the cases were identified by race.
“More complete reporting of race and ethnicity data at the provider and jurisdictional levels is essential to ensure rapid detection and response to potential disparities in COVID-19 vaccination,” the researchers said.