California will begin setting aside 40% of all vaccine doses for the state's most vulnerable neighborhoods.
Officials say it is an effort to inoculate the people most at risk for the coronavirus more quickly and correct inequalities in access to the vaccine.
Two officials with the Newsom administration confirm to KCBS Radio that the doses would be spread out among 400 zip codes at the bottom of the state’s Healthy Places Index, which measures factors including income, housing status, education and access to healthcare services. Nearly eight million people would benefit.
Specific details about the plan have yet to be released, but it is an effort to protect people who are the most likely to get sick and transmit the virus and have less access to the vaccine.
The bottom 25% of communities on the state’s socioeconomic ladder make up 40% of the state’s virus cases and represent areas where more essential workers live.
It includes communities like Southeast San Francisco, Richmond and East Oakland.
That's where Oakland city councilman Noel Gallo has been working to get people over their initial fear of the vaccine. He says in his heavily Latino Fruitvale District, the neighborhood clinics have been busy.
"We’ve kinda gotten over the fear. Reality is that mom and grandpa and grandma are passing away. I’ve got volunteers that have lost a father and mother,” said Gallo. “So the message is very clear, forget what you’re thinking about but you gotta come get the vaccine. And people are lined up."
While the Healthy Places Index does not consider race as a factor, more Black, Latino and Asian-Pacific Islander communities do live in these areas, so the shift is expected to also address the racial disparities in vaccinations.
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, Latinos make up about 39% of the state’s population and Blacks about 6%. But state data shows that Latinos have received just 17% of the vaccines, and Black people have received just 2.9%.
There has also been a push to make vaccines more convenient to get. Over the weekend, mobile clinics in East Oakland at churches and places of worship worked so well that they gave out more than double the expected amount of shots.
State officials say that once two million doses have been given out in these designated neighborhoods, they will loosen the requirements to move from the purple tier to red. The current tally is at about 1.6 million doses, so they anticipate it will take another week or two to give out 400,000 more.
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