Black churches are vital for inoculation
With Easter and Passover a couple of weeks away, the Book of Exodus is at the forefront of Kevin White’s mind.
But he didn’t need the holidays to recall the children of Israel and their plight. For the past year, the coronavirus has been nothing short of a plague.
As White, bishop of Covenant Fellowship Church in Chesapeake, works with other Black pastors to find vaccines for congregants, the Biblical reference isn’t far from reach should he encounter someone skeptical of a COVID-19 shot.
In Egypt, it was the blood of a lamb that kept the angel of death away. Today, it’s messenger RNA and spike proteins.
“This vaccine could be seen as putting blood on the doorpost,” he said. “We’re hoping and praying to get this plague to move on.”
While public health officials are targeting communities at higher risk of serious illness and death for the vaccine, perhaps no one has been more effective at reaching older Black Virginians than pastors, preaching the lifesaving benefits of immunizations from the pulpit. Many across the state have run a boots-on-theground campaign to inform eligible churchgoers about vaccination opportunities. And they’ve solved a practical problem for local health departments that had been a stumbling block: lack of internet.
Where convention centers have
been intimidating or too far from neighborhoods with the most vulnerable people, Black clergy have offered their churches as vaccine clinics.
Don’t have a way to get there? Though churches have been wary of loading up vans — it’s the coronavirus, after all — there’s usually a parishioner willing to drive a single passenger.
Rev. James Allen, president of the Virginia Beach Interdenominational Ministers Conference, said Black churches have had success breaching the gap in the public health message because they have a long history of social activism. Some pastors have added it’s their long-held reputation as a trusted voice in the Black community, stretching back to slavery.
“One simple answer: Black people go to church, and even if they don’t, their mother, father or grandmother goes to church,” said Allen, a pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Virginia Beach. “Even people who don’t go to church but need life-sustaining things, they go to the church in their neighborhoods in those times of need.”
Early on, faith leaders found many of their eldest congregants weren’t on a waiting list because they didn’t have email addresses or computers. Church staff began poring over membership records, finding those eligible by age and creating meticulous spreadsheets of names, phone numbers and health districts. They registered those in the state’s system who wanted shots.
If a person didn’t have an email address, the churches put their own on the electronic forms. And when the emails arrived for individuals to schedule a time or remind them of upcoming appointments, churches acted as the go-between.
“We do it ourselves — make the phone call,” said Kevin Swann, pastor at Ivy Baptist Church in Newport News. “It’s just what’s necessary.”
For White, president of the Chesapeake Coalition of Black Pastors, one of the biggest hurdles was getting the word out about vaccines to elderly Black residents in the South Norfolk neighborhood, an area with a high rate of coronavirus hospitalizations. Churches went door to door and made cold calls to let them know about a clinic hosted by Bethany Baptist Church on Feb. 16, partnered with Chesapeake Regional Medical Center.
Sentara Healthcare also is focusing on giving a large portion of its shots to minorities, regardless of whether they’re patients. Once the hospital operator knows how many doses to expect from local health departments for the next week, it has mere days to get organized and fill slots. Iris Lundy, director of health equity for Sentara, says she couldn’t do it without pastors.
Lundy had been in her role only a few months when she heard about a weekly prayer group of about 10 pastors in South Hampton Roads. At the time, fall 2019, she had been focusing on health screenings for minorities, some of whom have disproportionate rates of cancer and heart disease, among other conditions.
Through that group, she met the president of the Baptist ministerial conference, who introduced her to more pastors on the Peninsula.
Those relationships became invaluable when the pandemic arrived, she said. The hospital system provided about 15,000 free COVID-19 tests to underserved minorities, most of whom were connected to Sentara through church leaders. That outreach eventually expanded to vaccinat-ing Lundy doesn’t even know how many pastors are in her contacts now.
“It’s grown extensively and across denominations,” she said. “It’s almost daily that someone is introducing me to another pastor.”
About received 14% COVID-19 of Virginians vaccina- who tions are Black, according to state data that included race and ethnicity information, yet Black residents make up about 20% of the population. Compare that to the rate of white Virginians, who make up 70% of the state’s population and receive about 70% of vaccines, the demographic data shows.
In an analysis this month, the Virginia Department of Health found disparities in coronavirus cases, deaths and vaccination rates that are particularly unfavorable to Latino and Black populations. Life expectancy in the United States is projected to be reduced at least three times more for them than their white counterparts as a result of the coronavirus.
Hospital admission rates also are higher for Black and Latino populations than other racial and ethnic groups. When compared with the white COVID-19 hospitalization rate, the Black rate is twice as high and the Latino rate is over 2.5 times higher, the state study found.
Initially, pastors worked with health care providers to build confidence in the vaccines. Early polls had shown a larger reluctance among African Americans to receive the shots. Public health experts have worried the long history of medical abuses in the United States, including the Tuskegee study, which left Black men with syphilis untreated, would keep many in the community from getting inoculated.
A poll from Associated PressNORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 1.5 months into vaccinations, resistance was still higher among younger people, people without college degrees, Republicans and Black Americans. The survey reported Black people were less likely than whites to say they have received the shot or will definitely or probably get it, at 57% compared with 68%.
But different perspectives have emerged, and another poll suggests hesitancy among African Americans isn’t just about history. The National Urban League recently commissioned a study that found 48% of Black survey participants said they had heard or read something that made them less likely to take the vaccine. About 35% blamed their hesitancy on safety concerns, such as side effects and allergic reactions, and 31% said they were concerned the vaccine was developed too quickly.
Swann said hesitance is nuanced.
Though his church hasn’t had a Sunday morning worship in the flesh for a year, he’s been reaching his flock through YouTube and Facebook. He invited a Sentara representative during one virtual service to provide information on vaccines and answer questions. Then, he partnered with Sentara to get shots for 900 residents in February.
It’s no longer a question of whether African Americans want the vaccine, he said. It’s about whether the vaccines are being made available at the same rate to people of different demographics.
“That’s the issue that cities and health districts are wrestling with, because you can have, for example, vaccination clinics in another part of our city that could get double the doses than what we get for our clinic,” he said. “So then the question becomes what justifies the number in one place versus the other.”
As the pandemic has wended its way through Hampton Roads, church leaders have had a frontrow seat to the life expense. They say they have performed countless funerals for people who have died of the infectious disease.
Under that heavy burden, many stepped up to get vaccinated as soon as they were able, then recorded their experiences and posted them online for others to see. William Tyree III, pastor of First Baptist Church Berkley in Norfolk, joked that he was more nervous about getting a swab jammed up his nose for a COVID-19 test than he was for getting his shot.
Those videos have become the veritable fire fighting fire on social media, where myths abound about the so-called mark of the beast, tracking devices and DNA-altering quackery.
White said several ministers and congregation leaders in Hampton Roads have even approached public health officials about how they can get certified to become vaccinators themselves. The thinking is that if people giving the shots at the clinics are familiar faces, perhaps that will make some people of color less reticent about rolling up their sleeves.
At New Hope Baptist Church on March 11, several churchgoers volunteered to help with the Virginia Beach vaccination clinic run by Sentara that would put about 1,000 shots in arms. Some were directing cars into parking spots, others were showing recipients how to check in and work their way from their tables to the monitored waiting area.
All were wearing masks. Every station and chair in the large auditorium was spread apart to maintain social distance.
The atmosphere was quiet and calm.
Allen pointed to the stage, where a large screen overhead had a clock letting recipients know when they could leave. Below it were health care workers seated at a table, drawing doses of Pfizer as needed out of vials. The vaccine can’t be kept at room temperature long.
“We don’t want to waste any,” he said. “We will use every drop of vaccine that we’ve got.”