In California’s vegetable valleys, vaccination victories

If demography really was COVID destiny, then Gonzales — a small, working-class town with a young, Latino population in rural California — would be a pandemic disaster.

Instead, Gonzales is among California’s most vaccinated places. In this Salinas Valley town of 9,000, 98 percent of eligible residents have received at least one dose.

Gonzales is part of a larger, unexpected success story around vaccination in the state’s two leading agricultural areas for lettuce and green vegetables — the Salinas and Imperial valleys.

North of Gonzales, the city of Salinas also boasts a vaccination rate above 90 percent, well above the statewide average and the rate on the Monterey Peninsula. Down on the U.S.-Mexico border, Imperial County is the most vaccinated place in the state’s southern half, as CalMatters first noted. Imperial boasts an 86 percent vaccination rate on at least one dose — 10 points higher than L.A. and Orange counties, and more than 20 points above San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

The contrast is even more dramatic when you compare heavily vaccinated Salinas and Imperial with the slow-to-vaccinate rural regions — the San Joaquin Valley and the North State — that have seen coronavirus surges paralyze local health systems this fall. Some counties in those regions have vaccination rates below 50 percent.

So, what explains the success of these two valleys, especially in inoculating younger Latinos working in essential industries — the very demographic the rest of the state struggles to vaccinate?

The answers start with vegetables. The Salinas and Imperial valleys share networks of growers, and workers who operate in Salinas through summer, and Imperial (and neighboring Yuma, Ariz.) in winter. These workers were among the hardest hit by the first wave of COVID-19 last spring. But, after the early months of the pandemic, agricultural networks in the two valleys rallied in a big way.

Tight collaboration among entities that can be at odds — growers, local governments, community advocates, health clinics — was crucial. In the Salinas Valley, the Grower Shipper Association, an agricultural industry group, and Clinica de Salud, a community health clinic, shared an award for their joint efforts to protect workers, with quarantine housing and mass vaccination campaigns. The Salinas Valley collaborators obtained their own supply of vaccines directly from the federal government, bypassing the state government. The vaccination collaborations also benefited from pre-pandemic organizing campaigns around farmworker health and the 2020 census count.

Down in Imperial, similar collaboration between county health officials, community nonprofits, the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association and health providers brought vaccinations to even the smallest settlements of the sprawling valley. Imperial officials and institutions even vaccinated people who live south of the border but work in Imperial.

Participants in these efforts say the aggressive early spread of COVID in the community meant there was little vaccine resistance — too many people knew how deadly the virus was. Some also see the vaccination success as a byproduct of increases in the county’s health infrastructure in the 10 years since the establishment of “Obamacare.”

But vaccination, for all the public conversation about national or statewide rates, is a profoundly local function. And Gonzales, which won a major national award for community health before the pandemic, provides a good example of how to do it.

Community health workers were central to the approach. Gonzales managed to hire two in 2020. Then in January 2021, by joining a program called VIDA that brought in county and philanthropic support, the city hired four more, for a total of six.

These community health workers went door to door, and into apartment buildings, schools and businesses, to build relationships with residents. They brought free food boxes, from three local food pantries that the city set up early in the pandemic, to quarantined residents. They also became certified COVID-19 testers. This helped them reach vaccine holdouts, who, after testing negative for COVID-19, were quickly registered for vaccine appointments.

The city’s vaccination campaign has been relentless — with many organizations partnering to host more than 20 mass vaccination clinics since February at the high school, the small and independent Gonzales RX Pharmacy, and the local Catholic church. To make sure there were always enough people in town who could give shots, the city had five Gonzales firefighters certified in administering COVID-19 vaccines. In addition to these personnel, nursing students from nearby Hartnell Community College and local pharmacy staff also handled inoculations.

“It’s very hard for people to say no, with the accessibility and ease of the process,” Carmen Gil, Gonzales’ director of community engagement, told me.

And therein may lie the prescription for ending this pandemic, even in the most stubborn locations. When so many different people and institutions in a place are working together to get you vaccinated, it doesn’t matter who you are or how small or rural your community is — resistance is futile.