PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Pennsylvania Department of Health officials laid out efforts today to get the vaccine to communities that need it most. It's hard to prove whether its working because the underlying data is unreliable.
Health department officials said Tuesday that the agency has a variety of efforts in place to help tackle racial and other health disparities and to ensue equitable and fair access to the COVID-19 vaccine throughout the commonwealth. They say they are engaging leaders and groups across ethnic and racial minorities to help inform decisions on vaccination sites, messaging and much more. The only problem: The state’s race and ethnicity data is so incomplete that it’s hard to determine who is getting the vaccine and whether the outreach effort is actually working.
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“It’s a challenge to have complete data,” says Brian Lentes, director of the Office of Operational Excellence at the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
According the state health department's COVID-19 Dashboard, of the more than 2.2 million Pennsylvanians who have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine shot, 1.6 million are white and just 65,000 are Black. The race and ethnicity of more than 360,000 vaccine recipients is unknown. Notably, data from Philadelphia is not included in the data set, making it even more complicated.
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Lentes says part of the problem is getting providers to collect the race and ethnicity information.
“We’re working very close with providers, taking enforcement actions if need be,” he says, noting that, in at least once instance, the state withheld first dose allocation until a provider collected the necessary data.
Last April, the Wolf administration created the COVID-19 Response Task Force for Health Disparity. At the time, Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine reported that 70% of providers did not report race or ethnicity.
The effort has improved, but according the task force’s own report, released in August, accurate race and ethnicity data provides valuable health care insights.