Vaccines on wheels: Facebook to send truck to neighborhoods.
Facebook’s community vaccine efforts are going mobile. In an effort to get coronavirus vaccines to underserved communities, the company said it is partnering with Bay Area nonprofits to send a mobile vaccine truck to schools near its Menlo Park headquarters.
The truck will show up at different schools on the Peninsula on Fridays and Sundays throughout the summer and can administer up to 40 doses per hour. More information about timing and schedules for the Friday trucks will be posted at www.facebook.com/RavenswoodSchools while Sunday information will be available at face book.com/FBMobileFarmersMarket.
Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg announced the effort in an online post Wednesday.
The company also plans to give people who get a vaccine dose a weekend’s worth of meals from its food program, as well as a week of groceries.
Menlo Park Council member Cecilia Taylor, founder of nonprofit Belle Haven Action, said the mobile vaccine program builds on farmers’ markets Facebook has hosted that have helped build community recognition and trust.
Taylor said vaccine uptake in the Menlo Park neighborhood of Belle Haven has been strong, but that “vaccine hesitancy is real.” She said bringing the vaccines into communities makes it easier for residents to access them and ask questions if they are hesitant.
“Removing the barrier means you bring it into the community,” Taylor said.
The mobile vaccine effort will replace the vaccination site the company set up at its Menlo Park headquarters for the local community in April. That effort saw the social media giant partner with the nonprofit Ravenswood Family Health Network to distribute shots to underserved communities on Saturdays, including free shuttles to the vaccination site.
Facebook says it met its goal of vaccinating 10,000 people in California with that effort, but wants to find ways to overcome barriers to people getting vaccinated.
Elsewhere in the Bay Area, mobile vaccine units are ramping up this summer in an effort to get the shots to people who may not be able to to get them for themselves.
In San Francisco, ambassadors are walking the streets of neighborhoods like the Bayview, Visitacion Valley and the Tenderloin where vaccinations are lower on average than the rest of the city.
“While vaccine acceptance has increased considerably over the last six months, there remain pretty significant disparities around uptake and getting vaccinated,” said KangXing Jin, Facebook’s head of health.
Issues like transportation and being able to take time off work were chief among those concerns, Jin said. Mobile vaccines overcome the issue of people physically getting to vaccination sites by “meeting people where they are,” Jin added.
Nonprofit organizations like Belle Haven Action are helping get the word out to community members, many of whom are immigrants or from Black and Latinx communities.
The company is also planning to expand its California vaccination efforts to cities and states where it has offices, including Seattle, New York, Austin, Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C.
Annabella Bastidas works for the nonprofit Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and has been working with the company to get vaccines out to the community, mostly in Los Angeles.
She said language barriers and booking appointments online are some of the largest issues many immigrant communities face in accessing vaccines. Concerns about interacting with the government for people who may be in the county without documentation is another concern to overcome, she added.
She said giving away gift cards for food and other perks is another way to get around vaccine hesitancy.
Part of the battle has also been making sure people get correct information about the vaccine when misinformation has at times proliferated online and on social media about side effects and risks.
Jin pointed to a national Spanishlanguage vaccine finder on WhatsApp announced last week as one effort to get vaccine information and accessibility out to communities that might not have access to it.