As Philadelphia fumbles on vaccines, Black residents are left on sidelines
COVID-19 drives a hard bargain inside Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market.
Social distancing is scarce in this bustling Center City bazaar, where retailers risk a deadly virus to keep their shops alive.
Some learn they have COVID-19 when they lose the ability to smell or taste the flavors long associated with the legendary market — the Pennsylvania Dutch apple butter, cheesesteaks, soft pretzels, roasting cocoa beans.
When a mass vaccination center opened across the street from the market in January, retailer Charita Powell noticed something odd: None of the people who got vaccines looked anything like the 67-year-old African American from South Philadelphia.
Others noticed, too.
Vaccine access has become a political football and a question of equity in America’s sixth largest metropolis. While others forge ahead, Philadelphia’s elected leadership feuds over how and where to distribute scarce doses of the vaccine. And every day, more people die.
Inequity is visible in the numbers. Whites are the minority in Philadelphia, with just 34% of the city’s population identifying as white non-Hispanic, according to a 2019 U.S. Census American Community Survey.
Yet whites are the most likely — 54% — to be vaccinated, according to city health records.
Seniors are on the priority list for vaccines. Yet most of those vaccinated in Philadelphia have been between the ages of 20 and 44, according to the city.
So far, just over 160,000 of the city’s 1.5 million residents have received at least one dose of vaccine. Another 78,200 have been fully vaccinated.
’No system’
“If I could get the vaccine today, I would get the vaccine,” said Chakir Bouchaib, who came to Philadelphia 15 years ago from Morocco and today operates the Little Marrakesh Bazaar at Reading Terminal.
Bouchaib said that his 70-year-old mother, who lives in a remote North African village, had received a vaccine from the Moroccan government. He has no idea when he’ll get one in Philadelphia.
He leaves work each night and immediately takes a shower and washes his work clothes, he said. “I must do this for my wife and my 3-monthold daughter.”
No one here has any sense of when they’ll get vaccinated, and hopes are not high.
“Maybe in the fall,” said Christopher Adams, of North Philadelphia.
Jack Mooney, of Northeast Philadelphia, hopes for the summer. “There’s no system. You just sign up on all these lists and hope someone calls your name,” he said.
Powell said she spends “hours and hours” looking for vaccines on the internet. “I’m hoping that maybe I’ll get some in the next 30 days,” she said. “I’m on so many lists.”
Political football
Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field could be the only NFL stadium in the U.S. not used as a mass vaccination center. The NFL has offered all its stadiums for vaccine distribution. Philadelphia’s mayor has, so far, said no.
Members of City Council, former Congressman Bob Brady, and former Mayor John Street have all urged Mayor Jim Kenney to use the Eagles’ stadium.
But Kenney has said that using the stadium will draw non-Philadelphia residents who will get vaccines before city residents. Kenney instead wants smaller, localized and neighborhood-based vaccine centers. Others want to go big.
“We, along with the rest of the nation, were put on notice to get ready. But since late December, when vaccines were first available, Philadelphia has fumbled a bit,” said City Councilman Allan Domb.
“Last Friday, council was informed that the city was in negotiations with FEMA to put their mega site at the Pennsylvania Convention Center,” Domb said. “Cities around the country with open outdoor stadium parking lots have not directed their FEMA mega sites toward smaller indoor locations to get vaccinated.”
Why would the city refuse to use any vaccination site? asked Brady.
“I did meet with the mayor,” he said. “I did present this plan to the mayor. We didn’t get anywhere with it. Every day someone is coming down with this disease and every day someone is dying.”
On Friday, the city’s administration announced it would indeed team up with FEMA to operate a vaccination site at the convention center.
The stadium dispute is just the latest challenge in getting residents vaccinated. Philadelphia receives vaccines and operates a program independent of the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
In January, city officials awarded $194,000 contract to a group of self-described “college kids” and allowed them to run a mass vaccination clinic at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
City residents submitted information to a Philly Fighting COVID website and questions were later raised about whether the organization could sell that data to other companies.
At the same time, other groups said they were denied funding to run testing and vaccination programs. Twenty-one organizations signed an open letter to city leaders on Jan. 29 and slammed city officials for what they described as a “dangerous and racist partnership” with Philly Fighting COVID.
At a City Council hearing on Friday, health Director Thomas Farley acknowledged that city vaccination programs had largely inoculated white residents. He said those administering the vaccines had failed to prevent some city residents jumping the line.
Philadelphia’s deputy health commissioner also resigned after records obtained by The Philadelphia Inquirer showed she gave Philly Fighting COVID an advantage in a city bidding process.
The city has now cut ties with Philly Fighting COVID and officials said they lack data on the nearly 7,000 people vaccinated by that group. Others have stepped forward.
Deliverance
Inside the Deliverance Evangelistic Church, Senior Pastor Glen Spaulding led members of the nonprofit Black Doctors COVID Consortium in an early morning prayer.
Outside, hundreds of city residents stood wet and cold under the falling snow. Some waited more than two hours outside, hoping to get a vaccine.
A glimmer of hope in a city marked by vaccine setbacks, the Black Doctors COVID Consortium began in April with COVID-19 testing in some of the city’s hardest hit neighborhoods. Now the focus is vaccines.
The nonprofit is led a pediatric surgeon Dr. Ala Stanford, who normally operates on newborn babies through young adults from offices in Jenkintown.
“Philadelphia is a city that is 44% African American and we know that 52% of the deaths in the city are African American,” said Stanford.
To all the other vaccine challenges, add a history of mistrust of the medical community among African Americans.
“If you don’t trust your doctor, you are not going to go, and that’s a cultural norm in the Black community,” Stanford explained.
Unethical treatment of minorities extends back more than three centuries. Slaves were used in surgical experiments prior to the Civil War. The U.S. Public Health System ran a “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” from 1932 and 1972.
Minorities were often left out of clinical drug trials for new medications. In 1993, Congress passed a law requiring “inclusion of women and racial and ethnic groups” in taxpayer-funded research. Before that time, white males were considered the “prototype of the human research subject.”
Stanford’s team could be turning the page in the Black community.
Some days, her largely African American group of doctors, nurses and volunteers is able to vaccinate 900 city residents at a time, mostly seniors and minorities.
Over the weekend, the consortium plans a 24-hour, walk-up vaccination site for residents of the city’s hardest hit ZIP codes.
Shivering after hours in the cold last weekend, residents rolled up shirt sleeves and awaited injections at Deliverance Evangelistic Church.
“You’re saving lives today,” Stanford told her team inside the chapel. “Let there be no doubt — you are saving hundreds of lives.”