Seniors get virus vaccine shots at apartment complex through clinic
In the 1960s and ’70s, they called him “Dancing Harry.”
A fixture at Baltimore Bullets and then New York Knicks basketball games, Edward Marvin Cooper was a fan well-known for his moves, his costumes and the hexes he cast on whatever opponents dared set foot in the Baltimore Civic Center or Madison Square Garden.
Cooper, 77, said he doesn’t dance quite like that anymore, but he was celebrating Sunday nonetheless.
Cooper received his second shot of the coronavirus vaccine at his senior living facility in the Park Circle area of Northwest Baltimore on Sunday, along with dozens of others.
“Everyone wants to take this off,” said Cooper, motioning toward his Knicks-themed face mask. “That’s my hope.”
Cooper was one of 76 MonteVerde Apartments residents who got their second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine this weekend. About 55 more got their first doses during the clinic, which was set up through a partnership with CVS Pharmacy.
There are more than 300 apartments at MonteVerde, right off Park Heights Avenue, specifically for older adults and people with disabilities.
“This is a population that really needs the vaccine and [has] limited transportation options,” said Mary Claire Davis, director of AHC Greater Baltimore, which manages the property.
For them, getting to a pharmacy, hospital or mass vaccination site could mean a bus trip, or asking a friend or family member for a ride. Thankfully, all they needed to do Sunday was walk downstairs.
The clinic was set up with the help of resident services employees like Latrice Goode, who hustled around the building’s multipurpose room Sunday, helping seniors get the paperwork they needed for their shots.
The room was filled with artwork residents had made during a Black History Month celebration in 2020 — pre-COVID times — Goode said. The colorful paintings and collages, bearing messages of peace and love, have now seen their second Black History Month. And they stood watch Sunday as MonteVerde residents, many of them people of color, got their inoculations, shielding them from a virus that has particularly hurt communities of color.
In Maryland, about 34% of coronavirus deaths have been Black residents. Maryland’s population, meanwhile, is about 31% Black, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
Still, Black Marylanders are receiving, on average, fewer shots than their white counterparts. They’ve gotten about 17% of the doses doled out so far (for which race data is available), a statistic that has community leaders and lawmakers worried that the vaccination effort isn’t reaching all state residents equally.
The disparity persists in majority-Black Baltimore City, where about 6% of Black residents have gotten at least one shot, compared with 16% of white residents.
Experts said it’s possible that distrust of the medical community among people of color is playing a role, but some residents have faced barriers getting sought-after vaccine appointments through the state’s system. Experts say holding more vaccine clinics at accessible locations, like residential facilities and locations easily reached via mass transit, could help address the disparity.
There are two mass vaccination sites in the city, but those accept patients from across the state. When asked Feb. 25 if he’d consider setting aside a certain percentage of appointments for Baltimoreans at M&T Bank, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said Baltimore was already getting more doses than it was “entitled to.”
Clorine Lewis, a 78-year-old MonteVerde resident who is Black, said she was wary about the vaccine at first.
“After I thought about it and everything, I said it would be best if I did because you never know just what it could be, and anything could help your body,” Lewis said.
Thomas Walker Jr., 62, who lives in the building, and often volunteers to help other residents, said he’s heard plenty of reservations from his neighbors. He said some look to documented medical abuses affecting the Black community, such as the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which hundreds of rural Black men in Alabama with syphilis were observed between 1932 and 1972, with investigators often refusing to tell the patients their diagnoses or refusing to treat them for the disease. Some of his neighbors, he said, worried that such abuses could be repeating themselves.
“A lot of people got it in their mind that the government is trying to fool us,” said Walker, who is Black.
Walker got his second dose of the vaccine Sunday, and said he’s excited for an eventual return to church services, since he sings in the choir.
“That’s what I really miss because I love singing,” Walker said. “And then my phone stopped working, so now I got to call my cousin and his wife to hook onto them to even go to church.”
Getting vaccinated comes with other perks, too, he said.
“The grandkids and the children won’t be bugging me [about getting the vaccine] so much,” Walker said.
A small group of Baltimore community leaders have set up their own hotline aimed at helping older city residents make appointments to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
The new phone line, 410-929-6024, was announced at a news conference at West Baltimore’s Simmons Memorial Baptist Church on Feb. 21 hosted by former Baltimore City mayoral candidate and Maryland deputy attorney general Thiru Vignarajah and longtime Baltimore civil rights leader Marvin L. “Doc” Cheatham, among others.
The group became frustrated by stories they heard from vulnerable seniors, particularly Black Baltimoreans, who were eager to get their shots, but struggled to find an appointment nearby, Vignarajah said.
“We will get on the internet with you, and we will start filling out some of the forms,” Vignarajah said. “We’re going to do what so many of us have done for our parents and grandparents to make sure they got the vaccine.”
The hotline will accept messages around the clock, and volunteers aim to call back any Baltimore resident over 80 years old within 12 hours. The volunteers can also be reached via email at unofficial.vaccine.hotline@gmail.com.
The effort also grew out of concern about a racial disparity in the vaccinations given out so far, Vignarajah said.
As of Friday, Black people had received 35.7% of vaccine first doses in the city for which race data was recorded. More than 60% of the city’s population is Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. White people received 49.3% of the shots with corresponding race data, but are 30.5% of the city’s population.
Eligible Marylanders have long complained about difficulties finding vaccination appointments. Many have recounted searching a sometimes confusing tangle of websites in hopes of booking appointments, including sites for pharmacies, hospitals, mass vaccination sites and local health departments. Marylanders 65 and over, in particular, have had difficulties booking time slots, and have sometimes turned to family members and friends for help.
The newly announced hotline is unofficial, and has been organized by private citizen volunteers. The state health department has its own phone line meant to help seniors or others without reliable internet access register for appointments at Maryland’s mass vaccination sites at the Baltimore Convention Center and Six Flags America (1-855-634-6829). The city has one too, specifically for vaccination clinics in Baltimore (410-396-2273).
Vignarajah said the hotline isn’t meant to duplicate those efforts, but rather complement them, and help Baltimoreans get their names on all the lists that could help them get vaccinated — whether it be Giant, Rite Aid, Walmart or LifeBridge Health.
The hotline will be manned by volunteers, who will help with booking appointments, but also help arrange transportation to vaccine clinics if need be, Vignarajah said. They won’t store any of the personal information used to fill out online forms, Vignarajah said, except contact information.
From the state’s perspective, the hotline could be helpful, wrote Charlie Gischlar, spokesman for the state health department, in a statement.
“Any help community leaders are willing to provide in getting the word out to the general public about vaccine safety and efficacy is appreciated,” Gischlar wrote.
The Maryland call center meant for those without internet access takes on high volumes,
including roughly 30,000 calls on Friday, Gischlar said. In less than a week, advocates have made more than 8,000 mass vaccinations appointments for callers.
In a statement, the Baltimore City mayor’s office said that the creation of additional hotlines “demonstrates the inefficiencies of the State’s decentralized vaccination appointment system and makes the benefits of a centralized ‘one-stop-shop’ appointment system for all eligible Marylanders, accessible both online and over the phone, as we continue to navigate this pandemic,” read the statement from Stefanie Mavronis, spokesperson for Mayor
Brandon Scott.
The new hotline is needed, and churches like Simmons are trying to help spread the word to their communities, said pastor Duane Simmons.
Especially given that Black Americans are more likely to suffer severe consequences from the virus, in part because they are more likely to have comorbidities due to social determinants of health, the hotline could save lives, Cheatham said.
“Today, on what could have been, should have been the 81st birthday of John Lewis, we’re getting in ‘good trouble,’ ” Cheatham said.
ALBANY, N.Y. — Gov. Andrew Cuomo acknowledged for the first time Sunday that some of his behavior with women had been “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation,” and said he would cooperate with a sexual harassment investigation led by the state’s attorney general.
In a statement released amid mounting criticism from within his own party, Cuomo, a Democrat, maintained he had never inappropriately touched or propositioned anyone. But he said he had teased people and made jokes about their personal lives in an attempt to be “playful.”
“I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive or too personal and that some of my comments, given my position, made others feel in ways I never intended. I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that,” he said.
He made the comments after the state’s attorney general demanded Cuomo grant her the authority to investigate claims he sexually harassed at least two women who worked for him.
Cuomo’s legal counsel said the governor would back a plan to appoint an outside lawyer as a special independent deputy attorney general.
Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who has been, at times, allied with Cuomo but is independently elected, appeared to emerge as a consensus choice to lead a probe.
New York’s two U.S. senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, said an independent investigation was essential.
Charlotte Bennett, a low-level aide in the governor’s administration until November, told The New York Times that Cuomo asked her inappropriate questions about her sex life.
Her accusation came days after another former aide, Lindsey Boylan, a former deputy secretary for economic development and special adviser to the governor, elaborated on harassment allegations she first made in December. Boylan said Cuomo subjected her to an unwanted kiss and inappropriate comments.
Cuomo said Saturday that he had intended to be a mentor for Bennett. He has denied Boylan’s allegations.
Migrant deaths: At least 15 Africans drowned when their boat capsized Sunday off Libya, a U.N. spokeswoman said, the second shipwreck involving migrants headed to Europe in just over a week.
Safa Msehli, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said the dead were on a rubber boat carrying at least 110 migrants, who embarked Friday from the Libyan coastal town of Zawiya.
The boat started to sink early Sunday and the Libyan coast guard managed to rescue at least 95 migrants, including six women and two children, she said. Msehli said many of the survivors suffered from burns from engine fuel, and hypothermia, with some taken to hospital.
Sunday’s shipwreck was the latest along the Central Mediterranean migration route. At least 41 migrants were reported dead last week, part of a group of some 120 migrants on a dinghy that left the North African country Feb. 18.
Palestinians to get shots: The Israeli government approved a measure Sunday
to vaccinate tens of thousands of Palestinian laborers, after facing fierce criticism over the small number of inoculations it had provided to Palestinians living under its military occupation.
Israeli teams will soon begin vaccinating Palestinians with permits to work in Israel or in settlements in the occupied West Bank, according to a statement by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Defense Ministry unit responsible for liaising with the Palestinians.
There are about 80,000 Palestinians who have permits to work in Israel and about 30,000 who have permits for work in the settlements. The tens of thousands of Palestinians who work in Israel without official documents would not be eligible for inoculations.
A heated debate has raged for weeks over whether Israel bears responsibility for the health of Palestinian in the occupied West Bank and the blockaded Gaza Strip.
Human rights groups have argued that international law requires Israel to provide Palestinians with the same access to vaccines as its own citizens receive. But supporters of Israel’s policies have contended that the Palestinians assumed responsibility for health services when they signed the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.
Hong Kong police charged dozens ofoppositionactivistsincluding Joshua Wong with violating the city’s national security law, taking formal action against them less than a week before China’s highest-profile annual political meeting.
Of the 55 opposition figures initially arrested in January, 47 were charged Sunday with conspiracy to commit subversion. They had previously been facing allegations of subversion. It is the largest mass charge under the new law since it went into effect last year.
The former lawmakers and activists were being detained
Hong Kong charges:
pending a court appearance Monday, the police said in a statement.
They were arrested in January on suspicion of subversion for their roles in helping organize a democratic primary contest over the summer that drew more than 600,000 voters.
Wong, who testified before the U.S. Congress last year, was already behind bars. He is serving a sentence of over a year handed down in December for a separate charge related to a protest in 2019; this is the first time he’s been charged under the national security law.
Others charged Sunday include veteran activist Leung Kwok Hung, former lawmaker Alvin Yeung, and the ex-convener of Civil Human Rights Front, Jimmy Sham, according to their respective Facebook pages.
A science professor at a university in central Michigan who claimed sinister forces were targeting him and breaking
Michigan professor fired:
into his home has been fired months after using racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs on Twitter.
Thomas Brennan announced in a Twitter posting Saturday he’d been fired, and Ferris State University later confirmed he was dismissed last week, The Detroit News reported.
The university, which put Brennan on administrative leave in November, declined further comment.
The Torch, the university’s student-run newspaper, first reported about the tweets in November.
According to the newspaper’s screenshots, one tweet said: “Covid19 is another jewish revolution.”
In a statement linked to his Saturday posting, Brennan expressed remorse for the tweets. But he said they were a consequence of self-destructive behavior and migraines that stemmed from a “secret program” in which electromagnetic fields and nanotechnology were deployed against him