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The role race should play in deciding who takes priority for the Covid-19 vaccine in the next phase of deployment is being tested in Oregon as tensions around fairness and access to vaccines are emerging nationally., reports Gillian Flaccus for The Associated Press.
An advisory committee making recommendations to the governor of Oregon and public health officials will vote later today on whether to prioritize people of color, target people with chronic conditions, or focus on a combination of groups at higher risk for coronavirus. Others, such as essential workers, refugees, detainees and people under 65 living in groups, are also being considered.
The 27-member committee from Oregon, a Democratic-led and extremely white state, was formed with the goal of keeping fairness at the heart of its vaccine rollout. Its members have been chosen to include racial minorities and ethnic groups, from Somali refugees to Pacific Islanders to tribes. The committee’s recommendations are not binding, but provide essential input to Governor Kate Brown and guide health authorities in shaping the deployment.
“It’s about revealing the structural racism that remains hidden. It is influencing the disparities we experienced before the pandemic and exacerbated the disparities we experienced during the pandemic, ”said Kelly Gonzales, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma member and health disparities specialist on the committee. .
The virus has disproportionately affected people of color. Last week, the Biden administration reaffirmed the importance of including “social vulnerability” in state immunization plans with race, ethnicity and the rural-urban divide at the forefront and called on states to ” identify the “drugstore deserts” where it would be difficult to be shot in the arms.
Overall, 18 states included ways to measure equity in their original vaccine distribution plans last fall, and more have likely done so since the vaccines started arriving, Harald Schmidt said. , a medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who has extensively studied the fairness of vaccines.
Some, like Tennessee, have offered to set aside 5% of its allocation for “highly disadvantaged areas,” while states like Ohio plan to use social vulnerability factors to decide where to distribute the vaccine, he said. he declares.
Attempts to address inequalities in access to vaccines have already provoked negative reactions in some places. Authorities in Dallas recently reversed their decision to prioritize the most vulnerable zip codes, primarily communities of color after Texas threatened to cut the city’s vaccine supply. This type of setback is likely to become more pronounced as states delve deeper into deployment and grapple with difficult questions about supply needs and scarcity.
To avoid legal challenges, almost all states that look at race and ethnicity in their immunization plans are turning to a tool called a “social vulnerability index” or “disadvantage index”. Such an index includes over a dozen data points ranging from income and education level to health outcomes and car ownership to target disadvantaged populations without specifically citing race or location. Ethnicity.
“The point is not, ‘We want to make sure the Obama family gets the vaccine before the Clinton family.’ We do not care. They can both wait safely, ”he said. “We want the person who works in a meat packing plant in a crowded situation to receive it first. It is not a question of race, but of race and disadvantage.
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