 Early in the first televised town hall of his administration, U.S. President Joe Biden told CNN's Anderson Cooper that "by the end of July, we'll have over 600 million doses—enough to vaccinate every single American." After a year of death, sickness and economic disruption, the rapid rollout of vaccines is reassuring news for sure. But how quickly can those shots get into people's arms? How well—and how fairly—have we distributed them so far? These are especially important questions during a pandemic that has afflicted people of color at much higher rates than their White counterparts. This week my colleagues at Bloomberg introduced a tool to track the demographics of the vaccine rollout, and as the data trickles in, it'll help us wrestle with some of those big questions about our recovery. The early results suggest vaccine distribution has become another part of American life where there's a divide between rich and poor, Black and White.
In New York City, once the epicenter for the U.S. outbreak and now a bellwether for its recovery, the data point to wide disparities: - White residents make up about one-third of the population but have gotten nearly half the shots.
- Non-residents of the city, who tend to be younger and White, represent a quarter of the recipients.
- In wealthy neighborhoods like Manhattan's Upper East Side and Upper West Side, more than 10% of adults have gotten vaccines.
- In Harlem, the historic heart of New York's Black community, just 3% of adults have been inoculated.
- In the Latino enclave of Washington Heights, the jabs have reached 6% of adults.
The trends echo across the country. Black and Hispanic people have not received vaccines at a rate commensurate with their representation in the local population in any of the 27 states and two cities tracked by Bloomberg. White people in all but five states have received more than their population share. Mistrust of the medical community, fueled by a history of abuse and maltreatment of communities of color, misinformation campaigns and a lack of time or resources to navigate a labyrinthine vaccine ecosystem have been cited as explanations for some of the disparities. But those issues aren't new and should not have come as a surprise to public health officials. In response, Biden plans to spend $1 billion on vaccine education for the public, while expanding distribution to include pharmacies, new mass vaccination sites and mobile delivery options. This week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced federally qualified health centers, which primarily serve low income and medically underserved communities, will begin receiving limited doses as well.
Still, the District of Columbia and 18 states have yet to publish demographic data about their inoculation programs. Without information from more than one-third of the country, it will be hard to know whether those interventions make the vaccination campaign more equitable, or if they can make up for the ground that's been lost. Those big questions won't have any clear answers.— Fola Akinnibi | 
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