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A state committee tasked with recommending the order of coronavirus vaccinations reduced its tentative list to 60% of Oregonians on Thursday, amid early signs of tension over how best to tackle historic inequality while being fair to anyone who needs a vaccine.
The latest iteration of the 27-member committee’s recommendations would include two distinct but overlapping groups that together make up more than 2.5 million Oregonians. If the recommendations hold, they would be vaccinated after the 1.4 million people the governor has already prioritized for vaccines.
For now, the Vaccine Advisory Committee recommends that BIPOC communities, numbering approximately 806,000, and people with underlying chronic diseases, numbering approximately 1.8 million Oregonians, are then vaccinated. They would track healthcare workers, residents and senior care staff, inmates, teachers and some seniors who are or soon will be eligible.
The result of Thursday’s deliberations was a marginal winnowing of last week’s recommendations, which also included refugees, frontline workers and inmates.
“We have a real job to do to prioritize this,” Kalani Raphael, of the Oregon Pacific Islander Coalition, said of the group’s initial recommendations. “Otherwise we won’t get any priority, really.”
The group will reconsider and possibly smaller, then vote on the suggestions at its next full meeting on January 28. The committee has until mid-February to tell the Oregon Health Authority who should be vaccinated after the governor’s priority populations.
The health authority created the group as part of Oregon’s 10-year goal to counter generational racism by reshaping the healthcare system. The agency said it would follow the committee’s recommendations, assuming they pass the legal and practical review as well as the governor’s approval.
But like the extraordinary challenge behind the fight against a concept as amorphous and at the same time concrete as “systemic racism”, one of Thursday’s two proposals is already at the heart of the concerns of health experts. and government officials: focus on people with chronic illnesses.
The rationale presented by some of the supporters of the approach was that minorities are more likely than whites to suffer from chronic diseases that make coronavirus infection particularly dangerous, such as diabetes, cancer, or HIV infection.
But the proposal was hardly original, given that the federal government is already recommending that people with chronic diseases be subsequently vaccinated, as well as those 65 years and older. Governor Kate Brown has decided not to prioritize people with chronic illnesses, allowing teachers to get vaccinated on January 25 and people 80 and over on February 8, with more seniors becoming eligible on on a weekly basis.
In light of the committee’s fundamental purpose – to help start Oregon’s battle against historic inequalities – one of the committee members bristled when members proposed that people with health problems should priority before or instead of minorities.
When these members clashed, Kelly Gonzales almost accused them of being complicit in trying to maintain white hegemony.
“We’re also dealing with our own conditioning of white supremacy as it appears in our decision-making,” said Gonzales, a member who represents Native Americans living in cities.
Blacks, natives and other people of color were ultimately included in the list, above those with underlying conditions. It is not known whether the committee will ultimately recommend that BIPOC communities be vaccinated before people with underlying diseases.
Last week, the group began their discussions with an extremely large list and asked the health authority to analyze how it could immunize: BIPOC communities, refugees, people aged 16 to 64 with chronic illnesses, people eligible for vaccines who are in prison or in prison, staff frontline people who were not already eligible, people in multi-generation homes and people under 65 living in low-income senior housing or other collective care facilities.
A health authority official began Thursday’s meeting by saying that the most practical way to meet the priorities set by the group a week ago would be to target neighborhoods based on a combination of parameters such as demographics, the prison population and occupational risks.
This would allow the health authority to target multiple committee priorities at once, said Rachael Banks, the agency’s director of public health.
The idea didn’t seem to have much success with the group, especially after one member pointed out that vaccines are sensitive and getting them to the right wards without wasting doses could be a challenge.
Whatever content on the final list the committee sends to the state, its recommendations will have to work with three fundamental hurdles: the legal viability of the recommendations, Brown’s existing priorities, and vaccine availability.
To date, Oregon has administered approximately 254,000 out of 479,000 vaccines received.
The state has already built a long queue, including about 250,000 healthcare workers and residents and elderly care staff who have not yet received a vaccine, 100,000 nursery school, daycare workers and Kindergarten to Grade 12 and 768,000 Oregonians 65 and over.
Oregon is only planning 1.1 million doses of the vaccine in total until February.
Yet where exactly millions of Oregonians stand behind them may depend on the committee’s further decisions.
– Fedor Zarkhin
503-294-7674; [email protected]
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