People are waiting on January 28, 2021 outside of Los Angeles, California, outside a COVID-19 distribution center at the Kedren Community Health Center.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
The White House will begin sending doses of Covid-19 vaccines directly to federal-qualified health centers next week to extend outreach to traditionally underserved communities, White House Covid-19 coordinator Jeff Zients announced Tuesday.
Along with other initiatives such as mass vaccination sites and mobile clinics offered by federal support, the new program will seek to ensure equity in vaccination vaccines, Zients said.
“Equity is at the heart of our strategy to put this pandemic behind us, and equity means reaching out to everyone, especially those in underserved and rural communities,” Zients said. “But we cannot do it effectively at the federal level without our partners at the state and local level sharing the same commitment to equity.”
Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, chair of the White House Covid-19 Health Equity Health Task Force, noted that there are more than 1,300 community health centers serving nearly 30 million people across the country.
“Two-thirds of their patients live at or below the federal poverty line, and 60% of patients at community health centers identify as racial or ethnic minorities,” she noted. “Equity is our North Star here. This effort, which focuses on direct allocation to community health centers, is actually about connecting with the hard-to-reach populations across the country.”
Over the course of the program, the White House plans to send doses to at least one center in each state, with 1 million being distributed among 250 centers in the coming weeks, Nunez-Smith said. She noted that at the same time, the government is working to increase public confidence in the vaccines, “which we know is lower in the inferior communities than for the national average.”
The announcement of the Community Health Centers program comes after the launch of the retail pharmacy program, in which the federal government will start sending doses directly to several hundred pharmacies across the country. Nunez-Smith said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working with participating pharmacy companies to ensure they reach ‘socially vulnerable areas’.
The administration has also announced that it is again increasing the number of doses it sends to countries each week. The federal government will now send 11 million doses to states every week, up from 8.6 million it sent three weeks ago, Zients said.
“This is a 28% increase in vaccine stocks during the first three weeks,” he said.
Asked if there is an inevitable compromise between fairness and the speed of vaccine distribution, Zients said: “I do not accept the premise at all.”
“I think we can do it in a fair, just and efficient way,” he said. “So both efficiency and fairness are central to what we do, and I see no compromise between the two. I think they go hand in hand.”