OAKLAND — On Easter Sunday, the entire block in front of West Oakland’s 34th Street Community Church shut down. Local vendors hosted stalls while a pop-up clinic doled out vaccine doses to parishioners and neighborhood residents, including longtime pastor Dr. Lawrence VanHook’s elderly mother.
But even though more than 500 people got their shots that day, VanHook was overwhelmed with mixed emotions: The clinic’s success — and the lines of people he had to turn away — reminded him just how many people in his community have yet to receive the lifesaving vaccine.
Halfway into April, the vaccination rollout continues to lag for many Latino and Black Californians. Bay Area community leaders, residents and experts say that multiple factors, including the technological savvy required to make appointments, a lack of centralized information about how to get the shots, and inconsistent services from community clinics have combined to make every step of the process a challenge for people who are most at risk for getting sick.
“My hope and prayer is that we’ll be able to get some transparency around how to get the vaccinations to the people, where they live, work and worship,” said VanHook, who serves mostly Black parishioners. “But I’m very disappointed that more people on the ground don’t have control over our own destiny.”
The numbers bear out VanHook’s concerns. Statewide, about 22% of total vaccine doses have gone to Latinos and 3.2% of doses have gone to Black people. But Latinos account for about 56% of cases, 47% of deaths and nearly 40% of the population, while Black Californians account for about 6.3% of deaths and 6% of the population, according to California Department of Public Health data.
In six core Bay Area counties — Santa Clara, San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Marin — none has distributed more than 16% of total vaccine doses to Latino residents or more than 6% to Black residents.
The reasons are myriad. After California expanded the vaccine rollout to those outside health care and long-term care facilities in mid-January, appointments were centralized on the state’s My Turn website. The system proved difficult to navigate and required refreshing pages for hours at a time, while access codes meant for vulnerable communities were widely shared among affluent people, perpetuating existing disparities.
Recognizing it was falling behind, the state in early March targeted millions of doses for disadvantaged neighborhoods but the effort, while narrowing the gap, has fallen far short of eliminating it.
“You’re going to see people who are higher educated, more well-off, have the time to do this and aren’t homeschooling kids and going to work, and speak English, and can answer these questionnaires — they’re the ones who are going to get vaccinated,” said Luisa Buada, CEO of Ravenswood Family Health Center in East Palo Alto. “And that’s exactly what we saw.”
A few miles from Community Church, West Oakland Health Council’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Adrian James said that many people who show up in search of a walk-up dose still aren’t sure what to Google to find appointments near them, or how to strategically refresh pages. The multitude of providers with individual sign-up sites, including CVS and Walgreens, has made the process more daunting.
Although community health workers are canvassing hard-hit neighborhoods like East San Jose, San Pablo, Richmond and East Oakland to sign people up directly with iPads, they can’t reach everyone who needs help.
Sunnyvale resident Mariana Sandoval, 28, stayed up until 3 a.m. several days in a row to find appointments for four relatives, all of whom emigrated from El Salvador and primarily speak Spanish. Although her uncle-in-law searched too, he landed on a screen showing “no available appointments” and thought that meant he wasn’t eligible in the first place, Sandoval said. He resigned himself to rising at 2 a.m. to wait in line at a walk-up clinic before starting work as an Uber driver.
“It’s just so unfair that they had to rely on word of mouth, or a flyer, and not even have a chance or a small chance of getting the vaccine,” Sandoval said of her family. “It’s easier to just give up.”
“I just feel like we’re not being taken into consideration, these situations specific to the Latino community,” she added.
Some solutions aimed at easing access for vulnerable communities have added to the confusion. When a one-day pop-up clinic was hosted outside the Community Health Partnership office in San Jose on a Monday several weeks ago, more than 50 people lined up the following Monday expecting a shot, though the pop-up wasn’t repeated, CEO Dolores Alvarado said. Other pop-ups in the Bay Area have been unexpectedly canceled for lack of supply, frustrating residents who had already planned to take off work to get their dose.
“We need something more centralized and consistent,” Alvarado said. “You know those stores that have been around forever, the Macy’s? ‘We’re always here for you, we’ve been here for you, we’re still on the corner of Fifth and Main.’ That works — it makes you feel confident.”
Overcoming a lack of information has also proven challenging, local leaders say. A survey conducted in early February by the Rockefeller Foundation, which is helping to fund rollouts for community-based organizations such as Oakland’s Roots Clinic, showed that the overwhelming majority of Black and Latino respondents in Oakland planned to get vaccinated but were unsure where to go.
Contradictory information about the vaccine itself and how to find it also continues to circulate in Facebook posts, among friends and from religious leaders, said Dr. James with West Oakland Health. He’s been calling patients to talk them through the process one-on-one.
“I’ve had so many patients say, ‘I’m so glad you called,’” James said. “It’s just making sure that those questions get answered — ‘You get the vaccine here, you need to make that happen.’”
Now that eligibility has opened up to all Californians over 16, some providers fear that their clients will have even more trouble competing online for scarce appointments. But Andrea Schwab-Galindo, who oversees Tiburcio Vasquez Health Center in Alameda County, hopes that the expansion will allow multigenerational households to get vaccinated together and slowly start closing the disparities.
“This week, I can tell you that I’m very optimistic about where we can get to,” Schwab-Galindo said, “for the first time since we started vaccinating people.”
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