More than 400 Massachusetts doctors push for vaccine priority in hotspot communities

More than 400 Boston-area doctors are calling for state officials to prioritize hotspot communities for coronavirus vaccination by developing a distribution plan with local partners.

“Our Black and Latino neighbors have been the hardest hit by the pandemic, and we have failed to implement sufficient measures to protect them,” wrote the doctors in a Jan. 19 letter to Gov. Charlie Baker and health officials.

They added, “We cannot afford to neglect our hotspot communities during the roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccine.”

Baker has pledged to reserve 20% of the vaccine supply for vulnerable communities during phase 2 and 3 and recently expanded vaccine sites, but without a program for delivery of the doses, the doctors say it is not enough.

“Caring for these communities and making vaccine accessible in these communities is important for everybody and it takes a plan which we have not seen to date,” said Dr. Regina LaRocque, infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School and one of the organizers of the letter.

LaRocque told the Herald, “We want our commonwealth to be pulling out all the stops to get vaccine quickly to the places that are suffering the most from COVID and we are waiting to see if that is going to happen.”

Communities such as Lawrence, Chelsea, Revere, Brockton and many others have endured sky high test positivity rates and significant deaths since the pandemic began.

“We found so many sick Chelsea residents in our food line,” said Dinanyili Paulino of The Chelsea Colborative, also called La Colaborativa. “We now want to help offer our community members the vaccines.”

The doctors also said there has been household crowding, housing insecurity and lack of workplace safety measures in hard-hit communities.

In Rhode Island, officials focused vaccine distribution efforts on Central Falls, its highest-risk community of low-income Latino residents by delivering vaccines to public housing residents, the doctors note in their letter.

Dr. Julia Koehler, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School, said she and other doctors would do the same.

“We are glad to volunteer and administer vaccines together with hundreds if not thousands of other doctors and medical students,” said Koehler.

Nearly 40 million vaccine doses have been distributed in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 16.5 million have been administered.

A spokeswoman for Baker said in a statement that Massachusetts’ distribution plan, “reflects the state’s commitment to equitable distribution of the vaccine and prioritizes the preservation of health care resources, vulnerable populations and communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the virus.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/39OYPxj