Community groups' $6 million contracts with county expired, but they say there's much more work to do
After a year-long outreach campaign and $6 million in county funding, COVID vaccination rates for Black San Diegans stepped up a little but are still hovering around 50 percent, far below most other demographic groups in the county.
In some parts of the county, such as areas in North and East County, the Black vaccination rate is even lower. It’s 33.2 percent in North Coastal San Diego, for instance.director, said San Diego county is approaching its goals for vaccination levels in disadvantaged communities and has worked to reach specific populations, including African Americans.
Starting in September 2020, the Multicultural Health Foundation worked under the county and employed 12 community health workers throughout the county, assigning two each to North, South and East County and six to central San Diego. James-Price said the foundation proposed that number of staff members to the county, but as the campaign progressed and new COVID-19 variants emerged, she said she realized that wasn’t enough to saturate the county.
They offered COVID-shots in coordination with other services such as blood pressure checks, food distribution and assistance with child tax credit applications, she said. James-Price said they spoke with more than 75,000 people and vaccinated more than 5,000 people at pop-up clinics over the course of the year.
“They have to have skin in the game, so their parents had to give approval for them to get vaccinated, before I would give them a sports physical,” she said. But there’s a grab bag of other reasons behind vaccine hesitancy, Afflalo said, ranging from vaccine myths to religious reservations. “When it comes to African Americans, we are a small population to begin with, and you pepper us throughout the county,” James-Price said. “I would really like to see some effort in those areas of Oceanside and places in East County that have large populations of African-Americans.”
Mental Health America received an $834,311 county grant to promote COVID-19 vaccinations in Black communities, which funded a campaign of door-to-door outreach, social media campaigns and town hall meetings. Although the two county contracts focused on Black populations have ended, other organizations are still providing vaccine information and access to various cultural groups, Wooten said.
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