Vice President Kamala Harris announced Monday that the Biden administration will invest $ 250 million in federal grants to community organizations working to address gaps in the response to COVID-19.
Speaking to the National League of Cities, Harris announced the funding, which is aimed at organizations that encourage minority and deficient populations to receive vaccines against COVID-19 and to adopt safety practices to help them avoid the contract of the virus.
The initiative, called Advancing health literacy to improve the community’s equitable responses to COVID-19, will be headed by the Minority Health Office of the Department of Health and Human Services and will provide grants to localities that partner with community organizations. The HHS official said the plan is designed to help local governments improve their efforts around COVID-19 testing, contact locating and other mitigation measures, while partnering with organizations that better they know how to support their communities.
In his statements, Harris encouraged members of the National League of Cities – an organization made up of thousands of cities, towns and village leaders – to adopt the plan.
Harris has already been trying to reduce vaccination disparities stemming from racial, cultural, and socioeconomic concerns, some of which are caused by the vaccine mistrust among minorities and rural Americans. In December, Harris received his first dose of the Modern vaccine at United Medical Center in southeast Washington, DC, a hospital that serves mostly black residents in the lower-income area of DC.
The White House and other federal agencies have held listening sessions with various groups with a focus on increasing confidence in vaccines and addressing other barriers. While still a California senator, Harris introduced the COVID-19 Working Group on Racial and Ethnic Disparities Act.
“Our communities are dying at disproportionately high rates.” Harris said in February at a virtual roundtable with participants from local black chambers of commerce across the country. “We need to remind people that vaccines are safe, that they will save lives.”
According to the latest data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 35 states, the vaccination rate among white Americans was more than 2.5 times higher than the rate for Hispanics and almost double the rate for blacks. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that more than 55 million Americans had received one or more doses of the vaccine. Vaccine mistrust among some white Americans in rural communities has also been a growing problem in the vaccination process.
Among the concerns raised by Biden administration officials in closing the racial gaps is the scarcity of data.
“We also call on states to help us get the data we need to know where we are and work with us to find creative solutions to the inequality of vaccine adoption that has already emerged in these early months of the vaccination program.” Marcella Nunez-Smith, chair of the COVID-19 White House health and equity working group, said Monday. “I just want to be clear that achieving equity is not an aspirational goal. That is the critical mission. In the absence of equity, we will not be able to prevent this pandemic from continuing to claim lives, straining our health care system and weakening our economy.”
An HHS official told CBS News that the initiative is expected to fund approximately 20 projects in urban communities and 43 projects in rural communities over two years. The HHS Minority Health Office will accept applications for its new initiative until April 20th.