Role of Race in US Vaccine Rollout Gets Put to the Test
Story by Gillian Flaccus, AP News
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The role that race should play in deciding who gets priority for the COVID-19 vaccine was put to the test Thursday in Oregon, but people of color won’t be the specific focus in the next phase of the state’s rollout as tensions around equity and access to the shots emerge nationwide...
...In Oregon, health leaders are working on a social vulnerability index, including looking at U.S. census data and then layering on things like occupational status and income levels, said Rachael Banks, public health division director at the Oregon Health Authority. That approach “gets beyond an individual perspective and to more of a community perspective” and is better than asking a person to prove “how they fit into any demographic,” she said.
That makes sense to Roberto Orellana, a social work professor at Portland State University who launched a program to train his students to do contact tracing in Hispanic communities. Data shows that Hispanic people have roughly a 300% higher risk of contracting COVID-19 than their white counterparts in Oregon.
Orellana hopes his students, who are interning at state agencies and organizations, can put their knowledge to use both in contact tracing and in advocating for vaccines in migrant and farmworker communities. Vaccinating essential workers, prisoners and those in multigenerational households will reach people of color and put them at the heart of the vaccine plan, he said.