People wait outside a COVID-19 vaccine distribution center at the Kedren Community Health Center on Jan. 28, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
The White House will begin shipping doses of Covid-19 vaccines directly to federally qualified community health centers next week to expand its reach to traditionally disadvantaged communities, Jeff Zients, the Covid-19 White House response coordinator, announced Tuesday.
Along with other initiatives, such as federally-backed mass vaccination sites and mobile clinics, the new program will strive for equality in vaccine rollouts, Zients said.
“Equality is at the heart of our strategy to get out of this pandemic, and equality means reaching everyone, especially those in disadvantaged and rural communities,” said Zients. “But we cannot do this effectively at the federal level without our partners at state and local levels sharing the same commitment to equality.”
Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, chair of the White House’s Covid-19 Health Equity Task Force, noted that there are more than 1,300 community health centers nationwide, serving nearly 30 million people.
“Two-thirds of their patients are living on or below the federal poverty line, and 60% of patients in community health centers identify as racial or ethnic minorities,” she noted. “Equality is our North Star here. This effort that focuses on direct allocation to community health centers is really about connecting with those hard-to-reach populations across the country.”
With the program rolling out, the White House plans to send doses to at least one center in every state, with 1 million spread across 250 centers in the coming weeks, Nunez-Smith said. She noted that the government is simultaneously working to increase public confidence in the vaccines, “which we know is lower in disadvantaged communities than for the national average.”
The announcement of the community health center program comes after the launch of the retail pharmacy program, with the federal government beginning to send doses directly to a few hundred pharmacies across the country. Nunez-Smith said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working with participating pharmacy companies to make sure they reach “socially vulnerable areas.”
The government has also announced that it is again increasing the number of doses it sends to the states each week. The federal government will now send 11 million doses to the states every week, up from 8.6 million three weeks ago, Zients said.
“That’s a total of a 28% increase in vaccine supply over the first three weeks,” he said.
When asked whether there is an inevitable tradeoff between equality and speed of vaccine distribution, Zients said, “I don’t accept that premise at all.”
“I think we can do this in a fair, equitable and efficient way,” he said. “So efficiency and equality are both central to what we do, and I don’t see any compromise between the two. I think they go hand in hand.”