Following the mayor’s release of data showing white residents are getting vaccinated at three times the rate of Black and Latino New Yorkers, elected officials are demanding immediate action to scale up outreach and propose a spectrum of changes.
“It is not enough to just open a vaccination site in these communities — which came late — you also have to have a robust education with cultural[ly] competent people,” said Public Advocate Jumaane Williams during a virtual press conference on Sunday. The data also revealed that Black and Latino residents are receiving about half the share of vaccines expected for their population in the city. He called the disparities “disgusting” and “criminal.”
Williams's concerns echo what he said last year when death rates from coronavirus were revealed to impact Black and Hispanic residents the most in NYC. De Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo have repeatedly emphasized equity as central to the vaccine administration programs.
Some officials want to see the same resources that were marshaled for the census 2020 outreach program dedicated to vaccines. Despite a pandemic and President Donald Trump’s threats towards immigrants during census taking, NYC’s census response rate remained about the same as a decade ago, which was considered as a success due to the challenges of collecting a census during a crisis.
“When we did this census 2020 outreach plan, that was with a very heavy emphasis on utilizing relationships that our community-based organizations have [and] that our faith-based leadership has,” Manhattan Councilmember Carlina Rivera said in a phone interview. “I think we have to have that same approach right now.”
Comptroller Scott Stringer, speaking during a Sunday press briefing with Williams, wants to see a single, unified appointment sign-up website. When vaccine eligibility was drastically expanded to include those 65 and up and hundreds of thousands of frontline essential workers, signing up for a time-slot became a confusing patchwork of online applications that took some people hours to navigate.
“People are blown away by these different websites,” Stringer said. “Why we are not addressing this website debacle, I don’t understand.”
He and Williams also questioned why contact tracers weren’t reassigned to vaccine outreach.
City Hall spokesperson Avery Cohen said “depleting our contact tracing workforce is remarkably short-sighted” and countered that census outreach workers are being used.
On Sunday, de Blasio said the online sign-up system is going to be addressed. Ten more languages will be added, and a “family plan” appointment system will be put in place. Neighborhood residents will get priority hours in 33 focus neighborhoods, where existing outreach efforts will be expanded.
Though the data showed 40% of vaccine takers did not mark their race or ethnicity, NYC Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi said Monday the city had enough information to determine it would be “redoubling” its equity efforts.
The governor, who has received national acclaim for his press briefings during the health crisis and published a book about his response, has seen an exodus of top health officials within the state Health Department and has been criticized by local officials for thwarting vaccine distribution by putting hospital systems in charge, the New York Times reported Monday. Referring to racial disparities during the pandemic at a Monday press conference, Cuomo said, “I think we anticipated it. I think New York was the first state to predict this was going to happen.”
“We know there’s a real distrust issue,” Cuomo added, noting that an ad campaign is underway that will attempt to persuade New Yorkers to get vaccinated.
In a tweet, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams likened NYC’s pandemic response to Hurricane Katrina, which disproportionately harmed Black Americans due to a badly bungled federal response. The City Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus called on the city and state to “reconfigure what has thus far been a disjointed local distribution plan so that it prioritizes, foremost, the members of our most vulnerable and hardest-hit communities of color.”
“We need City Hall to be more upfront about the details, the nitty gritty work. We can’t keep talking in generalities,” Rivera said. “We need details and we need to have a very culturally humble, nuanced approach to this work. And it has to start like yesterday.”
The city Health Department said it is working with hundreds of community organizations, including partners of the Test & Trace program and noted various virtual vaccine sessions and forums with different community groups.
The city plans to expand outreach via community-based groups, while the state has touted its vaccine distribution kits as a way to easily set up vaccine sites in churches and public housing complexes.
Dr. Christina Pardo, head of health equity at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at SUNY Downstate, said the data reflected historic racial health disparities.
“Until we solve the root of a lot of these, we're going to keep seeing disparities no matter what the illness is or even something like this where it's vaccination,” Pardo said.
With WNYC’s Yasmeen Khan.
