People are waiting outside a COVID-19 vaccine distribution center at the Kedren Community Health Center on January 28, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
The White House will begin sending doses of Covid-19 vaccines directly to federally qualified community health centers next week to expand its spread to traditionally underserved communities, the White House response coordinator announced Tuesday. Covid-19, Jeff Zients.
Along with other initiatives such as federally-supported mass vaccination sites and mobile clinics, the new program will seek to ensure equity in vaccine delivery, Zients said.
“Equity is at the core of our strategy to leave this pandemic behind, and equity means we are reaching everyone, especially those in rural and poor communities,” Zients said. “But we can’t do it effectively at the federal level without our partners at the state and local level sharing the same commitment to equity.”
Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, chair of the White House Covid-19 Health Equity working group, noted that there are more than 1,300 community health centers nationwide, serving nearly 30 million people.
“Two-thirds of their patients live on or below the federal poverty line, and 60 percent of patients at community health centers identify as racial or ethnic minorities,” he noted. “Equity is our pole star here. This effort that focuses on direct allocation to community health centers is really about connecting with those hard-to-reach populations across the country.”
At the launch of the program, the White House plans to send doses to at least one center in each state, with one million distributed among 250 centers in the coming weeks, Nunez-Smith said. He noted that the government is simultaneously working to increase public confidence in vaccines, “which we know is lower in underserved communities than the national average.”
The announcement of the community health center program comes after the launch of the retail pharmacy program, in which the federal government begins delivering doses directly to a few hundred pharmacies across the country. Nunez-Smith said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention works with participating pharmaceutical companies to ensure they reach “socially vulnerable areas.”
The administration also announced that it is again increasing the number of doses it sends each week to states. Now, the federal government will send 11 million doses to states, up from the 8.6 million it sent three weeks ago, Zients said.
“This represents a 28% increase in vaccine supply during the first three weeks,” he said.
Asked if there is an inevitable trade-off between equity and the speed of vaccine distribution, Zients said, “I don’t accept that premise at all.”
“I think we can do it in a fair, equitable and efficient way,” he said. “So efficiency and equity are key to what we’re doing and I don’t see any compromise between the two of them. I think they go hand in hand.”