Getting more shots in more arms

As New York City negotiates the final details of this year’s budget, you would think fixing our bungled vaccine rollout would be front and center. Yet, even as the city’s own data shows distribution failing to reach the communities hardest hit by the pandemic, there is little conversation about funding proven strategies to increase equitable access.

In many cases, the same communities left behind by the current vaccine distribution plan were those that we at NYC Census 2020 (the city’s first-ever census office) worked hardest to reach just last year. We poured thousands of hours into crafting a detailed and replicable action plan that drove New York to beat almost every major U.S. city despite both strong interference by the Trump administration and COVID-related headwinds. That the central lessons from that plan were not baked into vaccine strategies from day one is both mind-boggling and tragic.

The key obstacle faced by both the census and the vaccine distribution is a lack of trust. After decades of negligent or even malignant government action, many of the immigrant communities and communities of color in New York have well-earned distrust of the government. Today, misinformation about vaccines is rampant. Last year, misinformation about the census — that cooperation could mean deportation — emanated from the White House itself.

To overcome that, it was clear we needed trusted community voices as our messengers and partners. We engaged with thousands of imams and priests, activists and organizers, unions and non-profits, community boards and small businesses. We told them what was at stake. We helped them cut through the noise and learn the facts. We trusted that they would know best how to reach out to their communities, and we gave them the funding to do so. In fact, we devoted nearly half of our $40 million budget towards grants to more than 150 community organizations, and established a grant process based on numbers of outreach contact points with the hardest-to-reach communities.

With this funding, for example, Sunnyside Community Services in Queens was able to embed two Census outreach workers within their immigrant outreach team. On the Lower East Side, University Settlement integrated census outreach within their Head Start program. Williamsburg-based social services provider, Southside United, integrated census information into their intake form. With these programs in place, almost 90% of all New York City neighborhoods either exceeded their 2010 self-response rates, or came within five percentage points of doing so.

In contrast, since July 2020, New York City has granted just $7.8 million to only 38 community groups to help raise awareness around COVID-19 and the Test and Trace Corps. Additional money has not been allocated to broaden these efforts to include addressing vaccine hesitancy and establishing a more equitable vaccine distribution, despite the mayor announcing in January $200 million to bolster testing and tracing. Community groups want to help, but few have the resources on their own to carry out meaningful outreach.

Equally troubling, the city has not utilized the network of 245 local neighborhood organizing committees we established to help overcome census mistrust and misinformation. This is a ready-made structure that the city could, if it wanted, activate tomorrow to aid the fight against vaccine hesitancy.

It takes time to build trust. It requires building relationships on a foundation of listening and responding. At its most basic level, it requires speaking the same language. One of the most crucial functions community groups aided the census with was reaching more than 80 of the 200 different languages around the city.

Community advocates have criticized the city for failing to produce high-quality translations of basic vaccine materials.

For the city to not have utilized our census model from day one is inconceivable, particularly given that the infrastructure of a community-based model existed and there was plenty of notice that vaccines would one day be coming.

The consequences of inaction are damning. The Upper East Side and East Harlem in Manhattan are separated by a single street, yet the vaccine rate of the former is nearly double that of the latter. White New Yorkers are twice as likely to have received an inoculation than their Black neighbors, despite the pandemic’s far greater toll on the latter.

With budget talks wrapping up, the window to take action is closing. Fixing our vaccine distribution, placing community groups at the forefront of outreach efforts, will not be cheap. But it is a small price to pay for a faster, fairer and more equitable ending to this long pandemic. The mayor and the City Council must make a choice: They can prove they care about equitable vaccine distribution, or they can allow this to become yet another sad chapter in the tale of two cities.

Menin is the former director of NYC Census 2020 and a candidate for City Council.