A state committee responsible for ordering the vaccination of coronavirus vaccines reduced its preliminary list Thursday to 60% of Oregonians, amid the first signs of tension over how to combat the best historical inequalities while is fair to anyone who needs a vaccine.
The latest version of the recommendations of the 27 committee would include two different but overlapping groups that together made up more than 2.5 million Oregonians. If the recommendations exist, it will be vaccinated to the approximately 1.4 million people the governor has put forward for shots.
For now, the Vaccine Advisory Committee recommends that BIPOC communities, numbering about 806,000, and people with underlying chronic conditions, which number about 1.8 million Oregonians, should be vaccinated next. They will follow health care workers, residents and senior staff, inmates, teachers and some senior citizens who are eligible or will be eligible soon.
The result of the deliberations Thursday was a marginal collection of last week’s recommendations, which also includes refugees, front workers and prisoners.
“We have real work to do to prioritize this,” said Kalani Raphael, of the Oregon Pacific Islander Coalition, about the group’s original recommendations. “Otherwise we’re really not going to get any priority.”
The group will reconsider and probably narrow down further and then vote on the proposals on the next proposal on 28 January. The committee has until mid-February the Oregon Health Authority to tell who should be vaccinated after the governor’s population.
The health authority established the group as part of Oregon’s stated ten-year goal to counter generational racism by reforming the health care system. The agency said it would follow the committee’s recommendations, assuming it passed legal and practical requirements, as well as getting the governor’s approval.
But in a reflection of the extraordinary challenge behind the fight against a concept as amorphous and at the same time concrete as ‘systemic racism’, one of the two proposals Thursday is already a thought for health experts and government officials: focusing on people with chronic health conditions.
The reasoning offered by some of the proponents of the approach was that minorities are more likely than white people to have chronic conditions that make a coronavirus infection particularly dangerous, such as diabetes, cancer, or an HIV infection.
But the proposal was barely original, as the federal government has already recommended that people with chronic conditions be vaccinated next, along with 65-year-olds. Government Kate Brown has decided not to prioritize people with chronic conditions so that teachers can be vaccinated on January 25 and 8 and older February 8, with more seniors being eligible weekly.
In light of the committee’s fundamental goal – to begin Oregon’s fight against historical inequality – one of the committee members made a stir when members suggested that people with health conditions should be prioritized over or instead of minorities.
When the members objected, Kelly Gonzales accused them all of being complicit in white hegemony.
“We are also dealing with our own conditioning of white supremacy as it appears in our decision-making,” said Gonzales, a member representing Native Americans living in cities.
Blacks, natives and other coloreds were eventually included in the list, above those with underlying conditions. It is unclear whether the committee will eventually recommend that BIPOC communities be vaccinated before people with underlying conditions.
Last week, the group had its discussions with an extremely broad list and asked the health authority to analyze how it could vaccinate: BIPOC communities, refugees, people aged 16 to 64 with chronic health conditions, people eligible for vaccinations in prison or in jail, frontline workers not yet eligible do not come, people in multi-generation homes and people under 65 living in low-income senior housing or other care institutions.
A health authority opened the meeting on Thursday, saying the most practical way to achieve the priorities the group set out a week ago is to target neighborhoods based on a combination of statistics such as demographics, prison population and occupational hazards.
This will enable the health authority to address multiple committee priorities simultaneously, said Rachael Banks, the agency’s director of public health.
The idea does not seem to have gained much traction with the group, especially after one member pointed out that the vaccines are sensitive, and that it can be a challenge to get to the appropriate neighborhoods without wasting doses. .
Regardless of the content of the final list the committee sends to the state, its recommendations must work with three fundamental obstacles: the legal viability of the recommendations, Brown’s existing priorities, and the availability of vaccines.
To date, Oregon has received approximately 254,000 vaccines administered out of 479,000 received.
The state has already built a long queue, with an estimated 250,000 health workers and senior care residents and staff who have not yet had a chance, 100,000 preschool, day care and K-12 workers and 768,000 Oregonians 65 and older.
Oregon expects only 1.1 million doses of vaccinations as of February 1.
Where exactly millions of Oregonians will stand behind them in the queue may still depend on the upcoming decisions of the committee.
– Fedor Zarkhin
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