State must address vaccine inequities

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that our collective survival is intertwined. Yet Florida’s rollout of the vaccine, of which universal access is needed to finally put the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, has been plagued by scandals and vast inequities.

Florida’s leadership must trade their scapegoating rhetoric for substantive policy that will actually help Floridians — policy based on fairness and community health interests.

From the very beginning, Florida’s COVID-19 response has largely deemed immigrant communities as disposable.

The state failed to make federally funded resources available to non-English speakers, in clear violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its implementing regulations.

And now, even as vaccines become more widely available and offer light at the end of a long, dark tunnel, the state is again excluding many communities of color and immigrants from life-saving relief.

So far, the state has largely prioritized high-dollar donors and high-income communities. White residents are about twice as likely to have received a vaccine than Black and Hispanic residents. That inequity is undoubtedly more pronounced when compared with Black, Brown, and Indigenous immigrants, who have largely been excluded from the vaccine due to residency requirements and an overall hostile environment to undocumented communities.

This is a public health failure of the governor’s own making. It’s now up to local officials and the federal government to work together to bypass the state leadership’s indifference to deliver doses to those who need it.

First, local officials can create workarounds to Gov. DeSantis’ discriminatory residency requirement. This policy places an undue burden on residents who are long-time community members but who have been unfairly denied a pathway to citizenship because of decades of dysfunction in Washington. The residency requirement also ignores people who are experiencing housing insecurity and may be unable to produce a lease agreement or utility bill, and the many low-income families who live together and share a lease under one name. Broward and Miami-Dade counties will soon be voting on whether to adopt community ID programs. While these programs are not new, few counties have adopted them. Now is the time for municipalities to explore this option to ensure that all residents have a form of identification.

Second, the federal government must work closely with county officials, community partners and employers to set up pop-up vaccination sites to deliver doses to essential agricultural workers at their place of work. This has been done in other parts of the country with great success, and it is another workaround to the exclusionary residency requirement. Many immigrant farmworkers — the same workers who have sacrificed their own health to keep food on our dinner tables — do not live near a Publix or mass vaccination site. It’s not enough to pay lip service to the critical labor of farmworkers. We must bring doses directly to these workers and other frontline workers.

Third, we must expand access to the vaccination sites. The sites should be conveniently located to communities and account for proximity to public transportation. Vaccination sites can also expand their hours of operation to account for essential workers who have neither the luxury of leaving work in the middle of the day nor the financial stability to miss several hours of pay. Local officials should also expand walk-in availability to ensure appointments are not reserved only for those with access to a computer or smart phone.

Finally, vaccine information must be available to people in a language they speak, including Indigenous languages and less commonly spoken languages. The federal government must enforce Florida’s obligation to the Civil Rights Act, and in the meantime, should consult with local organizations and county officials to allocate resources to vaccine outreach and education in communities who do not speak English.

Let’s allow public health experts to make public health decisions. Their recommendations are clear: Vaccines should be available to everyone, regardless of one’s immigration or economic status. And given the anticipated surplus of vaccine doses in the U.S., this is a no-brainer.

Intentionally leaving out large swaths of the population from the life-saving protection of vaccines is morally egregious. And an inequitable rollout will ultimately prolong the pandemic. That’s why our health and well-being are truly interconnected. When we deny the health and well-being of our neighbors, we are also denying ourselves and our loved ones protection from the virus.

Although we can beat the virus by all doing our part, our leaders have made selfish decisions at the expense of entire communities in Florida. It’s shameful, and Floridians will not soon forget it.

In the meantime, local leaders, community partners and employers in the state must work closely with federal officials to expand equitable access to the vaccine. Lives depend on it.