There are racial gaps in COVID vaccine distribution in MS. It’s worse on the Coast
Less than 9% of COVID-19 vaccines administered in Harrison County have gone to Black recipients, though 26% of county residents are Black.
The disparity, shown in data the health department provided to the Sun Herald last Friday, is significantly worse than the racial gap in vaccine distribution statewide. And that is also true for all but one county on the Coast.
As of Wednesday, 20% of vaccines in Mississippi had gone to Black people, in a state that is 38% Black. To achieve racial equity in vaccine distribution, the state needs to vaccinate about two times more Black residents than it has so far. Harrison County needs to vaccinate about three times more Black residents.
The health department provided data showing what percentage of vaccines had gone to Black residents as of Feb. 12 in six South Mississippi counties: Harrison, Jackson, Hancock, Stone, George and Pearl River. The Sun Herald compared the records to census data to determine the gap between each county’s Black population and proportion of Black vaccine recipients so far.
In every county but George County, which is 7.7% Black and where 4.6% of vaccine recipients are Black, the gap was larger than the gap statewide.
The widest gap was in Stone County, where 19% of residents are Black and Black people have received only 5.2% of the vaccines. The county would need to vaccinate almost four times more Black residents than it has so far to achieve racial parity.
The picture in Jackson County looks relatively similar to the state as a whole: Black residents, who make up 21.7% of the population, have gotten 10.5% of vaccines.
The county-by-county racial data shows for the first time just what proportion of vaccines are reaching Black residents on the Coast. Skepticism toward the vaccine among Black Americans, rooted in historic mistreatment and present inequities in health care, has long been a concern of health officials in Mississippi. But elected officials, church leaders, and community members have been working on trying to expand vaccine access, particularly for Black residents, for weeks.
Rev. Larry G. Hawkins, Sr., the pastor of Union Baptist Church in Pascagoula, helped set up a team within his congregation to make appointments for people who were having trouble with the website or hotline. He has spent hours researching the vaccines so he can answer his congregants’ questions, and he and his wife signed up to get the vaccine as soon as they could in order to “lead from the front.”
“I understand the shortage of the vaccine,” he said. “I think still, though, conventional wisdom says, if you’re going to get an allotment of 1,500 shots, instead of just taking them to Singing River, maybe you want to take 200 shots and allocate them to a location in the Black community.”
Last Thursday evening, Singing River Health System officials organized an at event at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Pascagoula for Black and Latino church leaders to hear directly from doctors about the COVID-19 vaccines. Singing River’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Randy Roth, told the crowd of about 10 pastors why he believes in the efficacy and safety of the vaccines.
When Roth opened the floor to questions, John W. Davis, Jr., the pastor of Faith Missionary Baptist Church in Gulfport, spoke first. He was looking for something simple.
“Access,” he said. “Information about access.”
Lack of vaccines at community health centers on the Coast
It is not clear why racial disparities on the Coast are worse than they are statewide. But one contributing cause is likely the location and type of vaccine distribution sites on the Coast.
At a virtual panel discussion hosted by Tougaloo College on Friday, State Medical Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs called community health centers “a remarkable mechanism to reach underserved communities.” More than 70% of people who have been vaccinated at federally qualified community health centers and other clinics are Black, Dobbs said.
There are very few of those sites on the Coast. The health department’s list of 38 such sites distributing vaccines for the week of Feb. 8 lists only three in the six counties of South Mississippi: Singing River Pascagoula in Jackson County, and Highland Community Hospital and Pearl River County Hospital in Pearl River County.
Coastal Family Health Center, a federally qualified health center, was providing vaccines at sites across the Coast, but announced Feb. 8 that they were no longer taking new appointments because their entire supply had been spoken for. The Sun Herald requested but has not received the demographic breakdown of Coastal Family’s vaccine recipients.
With relatively few community health centers serving as vaccine sites, most people seeking a vaccine on the Coast turn to the mass vaccination sites at the Coast Coliseum and Jackson County Fairgrounds — the type of location health department leaders have said are less likely to serve Black residents.
Technology and trust gaps
Some of the barriers preventing Black people from accessing the vaccine on the Coast affect people around the state, of all races. Hawkins, the pastor at Union Baptist Church, said some of his senior congregation members don’t regularly use the internet, which can make signing up for an appointment a challenge.
The process of getting an appointment, which typically requires some degree of technology savvy, a block of free time, and transportation to a site potentially miles away, favors wealthier people, and Black Mississippians are nearly three times as likely to be impoverished as white Mississippians.
Building trust in the vaccine among Black Mississippians, which the health department has emphasized through outreach to Black pastors and by holding events with Black doctors, is still a priority, a number of officials and pastors on the Coast said.
The disproportionate suffering of Black communities that has made vaccine equity so important also increased mistrust around all things COVID-19, said John Whitfield, the pastor of Morning Star Baptist Church in Gulfport. Early on in the pandemic, Black Mississippians comprised 72% of all deaths in the state. For some people, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine the disparity was intentional, Whitfield said.
“When you have that thought process… there’s a distrust that goes far beyond Tuskegee and the horrible acts that have taken place,” Whitfield said.
Trust and access are related issues, Chigozie Udemgba, director of the office for health equity at the health department, told the Sun Herald a few weeks ago.
“Not being able to get access adds to the mistrust,” Udemgba said. “People are less interested. It’s not necessarily mistrust of the vaccine at that point, but of the government providing the vaccine, especially if they see other groups getting vaccinated.”
Vaccine distribution at Isiah Fredericks
Community advocates have emphasized that one way to simultaneously build trust in the vaccine and expand access is to put it close to where people live, in a place they feel comfortable.
Not long after the vaccine rollout started, Gulfport Councilwoman Ella Holmes-Hines reached out to Memorial Hospital to propose a vaccination event at Isiah Fredericks Community Center, where Memorial had held a well-attended drive-through COVID-19 testing event in April, also thanks to Holmes-Hines’s advocacy.
Harrison County Supervisor Kent Jones, Gulfport Councilman Kenneth Casey and Memorial Hospital trustee Gary Fredericks lined up behind the plan.
When Memorial received a new allocation of doses from the state last week, they scheduled a distribution at Isiah Fredericks for Wednesday, Feb. 10. Matt Walker, vice president of clinic operations for Memorial, said that 738 people got the vaccine that day, most of them Black.
By comparison, the Coast Coliseum site vaccinates up to 400 people per day. As of Feb. 15, 26,459 people had been vaccinated in Harrison County, 2.78% of them at the single-day event at Isiah Fredericks.
Speaking just before the event wrapped up that afternoon, Holmes-Hines was jubilant at the number of people who had been vaccinated.
“African-American people have a resistance to the vaccine, but when you start pulling down some of the barriers, like location, location, this makes them feel comfortable,” she said. “They know me, they know Gary [Fredericks], they know Supervisor [Kent] Jones. When they see that we are asking them to participate in this, they feel like this is OK enough to do this.”
Walker described the main takeaway from the event for Memorial: “If we will go into the community and into various neighborhoods, there’s already demand for the vaccine.”
Though the distribution at Isiah Fredericks was a success by all accounts, it may not happen again for a few weeks. Memorial’s supply from the state is limited and unpredictable: by Thursday of last week, Walker still didn’t know what, if anything, his hospital would be getting this week.
Walker sees Memorial’s role as bringing the vaccine to communities around the Coast, rather than solely targeting racial disparities. Everyone wants to see the vaccine in their neighborhood, he said. He was hoping to be able to hold pop-up distribution sites in Orange Grove, Lyman and Biloxi in the near future.
“The demand is going to lend itself to the need to focus on all Coast residents,” he said. “So we can have offerings where we devote this week’s allocation to one subgroup of our Coast community, but really the demand is through the roof for this vaccine.”
Working together to get appointments
To expand vaccine access, some Black churches on the Coast have set up appointment-making task forces, in which members volunteer their time to secure appointments for others.
At Whitfield’s church, they sent out a survey to find out which congregation members wanted help getting an appointment, said Bernell Kelly, a leader of the team.
Kelly and two other congregation members collected the necessary information from those who wanted appointments, and an agreement that they would take whatever slot they got.
Then, they got to work. Kelly got local news alerts on her phone to find out about new appointment openings. Twenty times a day, she estimated, she’d check her phone to look for appointments.
Within a few days, the team had made appointments for 11 people.
“The Lord blessed us to get these scheduled so fast,” she said. “We’re not stopping.”
Since then, Kelly has done another two rounds of appointment sign-ups and secured vaccines for 58 people.
Hawkins’s congregation has created a similar team. So far, he said, they’ve secured appointments for 465 people.
Pat Harvey, one of the people who got her appointment through the Morning Star Baptist Church team, said she had wondered why there were few vaccination sites in predominantly Black neighborhoods in Gulfport. Community centers like Isiah Fredericks seemed like the perfect location, especially given officials’ stated concerns about equity.
“All kinds of stuff goes through my mind,” said Harvey, who is 82. “Like I said, I’m old, I’ve seen a lot of things and I have a lot of questions as to why. But I don’t have a choice in this matter. You gotta take the shot.”
