I personally knew some people who lost their elderly parents because of that scenario. The barriers have just been horrendous when you look at the data that we’ ve been collecting, in most areas, where there’ s a high number of African Americans and Latinx between the ages of 16 and 65 are not vaccinated. One of our goals was to target those areas of the county where there were very, very low vaccination rates and set up mobile vaccination clinics to be able to increase access to vaccine.
Other barriers that we became aware of were the major pods that the County had established early on in the first and second surge of COVID-19. People didn’ t have transportation to get to the pods at Dodger Stadium and the Forum. For the Latinx community, they were rumors that, you know, if you go there, ICE is gonna be waiting on you to pick you up to deport you. There was a lot of fear early on in primarily the Latinx community about people being picked up; losing their children by going to these sites to get screened.
The other issue has to do with vaccine equity. There was a county committee which Dr. Vargas served on, to try to ensure that there was equitable distribution of the vaccine, county-wide, especially among those communities or populations at greatest risk. And this committee met on a regular basis, looked at the data and made recommendations. But you still have this disproportionality of racial ethnic minorities being vaccinated at a lower rate than the general community.
And we saw that when we started our vaccine intake at the parks in South LA and Jesse Owens Park in particular, I saw people from outside of the community coming in to get vaccinated. We had to turn away lots of people because they had come from outside of South LA. Everybody was desperate to get vaccinated.
My private physician wasn’ t vaccinating. He said he had to go online to get vaccinated. My daughter urged me to get vaccinated. I decided to go over to Kedren. I’ ll never forget that day. There was a long line of individuals on 42nd Street just sitting and waiting. When I parked
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 21