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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that only 5.4% of coronavirus vaccine recipients were black, in the first analysis of how vaccines were distributed among different demographic groups in the first month of U.S. distribution.
This is lower than the percentage of black people who are residents of long-term care homes in the US (14%) or who work in the healthcare field (16%). Both were in the highest priority groups for vaccination.
However, the federal health agency stressed that its analysis is hampered by the lack of data. While the 64 states and territories and five federal jurisdictions that undertook vaccination reported age and gender in all cases, just over half of the records included data on race or ethnicity.
“More complete reporting on race and ethnicity data at the provider and jurisdiction level is critical to ensure rapid detection and response to potential inequalities in Covid-19 vaccination,” researchers wrote.
More than 97% of the data received by the CDC contain information on age and 99.9% contain information on gender. However, just over half, 51.9%, of the data contain an entry for race or ethnicity.
Furthermore, researchers said that the variation in state distribution plans weakens their analysis. States like Florida and Texas have rapidly expanded the criteria for admission to vaccines outside of health care and medically debilitated, to include many people over 65.
The CDC’s study looked at data from the more than 12.9 million vaccinations in the US between December 14, 2020 and January 14, 2021. The period covers the weeks immediately following the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) vaccines Moderna and Pfizer approved.
For the recipients whose race was known, 60.4% were white, 11.5% were Latino, 6% were Asian, 5.4% were black and 14.4% reported multiple identities. Of these records, only 6.7 million had information on race and ethnicity.
Black people in the U.S. died 1.5 times higher from Covid-19 than white people, and Latino people died 1.2 times higher, the Covid Tracking Project found.
Independent analyzes also found that ‘red flags’ are reported in the race and data states of ethnicity. A recent report by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only 17 states report such data. By comparison, 51 states and territories now report racial and ethnic data on deaths, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
Black and Latino people in the U.S. are sick and dying of Covid-19 at exorbitant prices, in part because of multiple inequalities and decades-old policies that have made these groups more vulnerable to Covid-19.
For example, black Americans are almost twice as likely as white Americans to develop type 2 diabetes during their lifetime, a risk factor for serious complications of Covid-19. At the same time, black and Latino workers are overrepresented in low-wage essential worker positions, where it is often difficult to give up socially.
Researchers have linked health inequalities to various factors that are systemic, such as housing segregation, which was at one point institutionalized as a racist U.S. government policy, to those as interpersonal as discrimination against health care providers.
According to a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the dramatic impact of Covid-19 on black and Latino people in the U.S. has reduced life expectancy by two and three years, respectively. By comparison, white people lost 0.68 years of life expectancy during their birth.