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Black Educators Take on Hesitancy as Gov. Newsom Issues COVID-19 Vaccination Mandate

Across California’s 58 counties, about 60% of the state’s population has been fully vaccinated. Black people account for about 5.8% of California’s population and 4% of those who have been vaccinated. 

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Man with face mask has a lot of questions and doubts about covid 19 vaccine./iStock

As the COVID-19 pandemic lingers on with Black Californians still lagging behind on getting fully vaccinated, leaders in the state, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, are taking steps to push more people to get the shot. It is the most effective way, public health experts say, we will end the global public health crisis. 

To help slow the spread of COVID-19, Newsom signed an executive order late last month to extend telehealth services. Then, last week, the governor also made vaccines mandatory for all students at public and private schools. 

California’s school vaccination mandate will take effect for students enrolled in grades 7 through 12 one semester after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the vaccine for children 12 and older. The mandate will also apply to children under 12 after a vaccine is approved for that age group. 

“The state already requires that students are vaccinated against viruses that cause measles, mumps, and rubella – there’s no reason why we wouldn’t do the same for COVID-19. Today’s measure, just like our first-in-the-nation school masking and staff vaccination requirements, is about protecting our children and school staff, and keeping them in the classroom,” Newsom said. “Vaccines work.

“It’s why California leads the country in preventing school closures and has the lowest case rates. We encourage other states to follow our lead to keep our kids safe and prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

Last month, Black educators from around the state met at the Reef Restaurant in Long Beach. One of the items on their agenda was getting to the bottom of why some Black Californians remain reluctant to get the COVID-19 vaccine. 

The event, themed “Vaccine Hesitancy: Understanding the Science and Getting people to Trust It,” was a presentation held during a meeting co-hosted by the California Association of African American Superintendents and Administrators (CAASA), along with along with the Los Angeles County Alliance of Black School Educators and the National Coalition.

In the process, participants said they wanted to provide some historical context. 

Lillie Tyson Head, daughter of a survivor of the United States Public Health Service Syphilis Study in Tuskegee, talked about the far-reaching damage caused by the controversial and unethical research project.

“The men were told that they had ‘bad blood’ and that they would receive treatment,” Head said. “They were never told they were in a study and the intent of the study.”

She said the federal government study fostered distrust among African Americans of the health care system. 

“Forty-nine years after the study was exposed and 89 years after the study began, people, particularly in the African American communities, distrust certain medical treatment and medical research.  And they are using this study as reasons for hesitating getting vaccinated or refusing to get vaccinated at all,” Head said.

Dr. Oliver Brooks, chief medical officer at the Watts Healthcare Center, said there are built-in biases in the medical system that contribute to African American skepticism. 

“There are studies showing that African Americans are less likely to get cardiac studies and procedures, stents versus just medication. They get less treatment for pain when they come in with sickle cell and other injuries like femur fractures,” he said. “The mistrust with the medical system is valid. It is a decision based on primarily mistrust of the vaccine and mistrust with the healthcare system.” 

Head also encouraged people to get vaccinated although she acknowledged that she understood why some Black people remain hesitant.

“How fortunate and blessed we are to know about the types of COVID vaccines that are available today,” Head said. “Why then should we deny ourselves getting vaccinated? We all have the opportunity to be informed, receive advice from professionals we trust and understand how we can protect ourselves by getting vaccinated.”

California Black Media’s coverage of COVID-19 is supported by the California Health Care Foundation.

Community

Pop-up Vaccination Clinic at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church

There will be free flu vaccines for the public at the St Andrew Presbyterian Church, located at 101 Donahue Street in Marin City. The vaccinations will be held on Tuesday, October 10, from 2:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. COVID-19 vaccines are available to eligible clients through the Bridge Access Program, which serves uninsured adults age 19+ at no cost.

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The Marin Health and Human Services, Saint Andrew Presbyterian Church, and the Marin County Cooperation Team are sponsoring the event.
The Marin Health and Human Services, Saint Andrew Presbyterian Church, and the Marin County Cooperation Team are sponsoring the event.

By Godfrey Lee

There will be free flu vaccines for the public at the St Andrew Presbyterian Church, located at 101 Donahue Street in Marin City. The vaccinations will be held on Tuesday, October 10, from 2:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

COVID-19 vaccines are available to eligible clients through the Bridge Access Program, which serves uninsured adults age 19+ at no cost. Vaccines for Children, which serves children and teens who are enrolled in or eligible for Medi-Cal, or who is uninsured, or American Indian, or Alaska Native, will also be available at no cost.

Walk-ups are welcome, but appointments are recommended. To make an appointment or to learn more about fall vaccines, visit GetVaccinatedMarin.org

Request for disability accommodations may be made by phoning (415) 473-4381 (Voice), CA Relay 711 or by e-mail at DisabilityAccess@MarinCounty.org

The Marin Health and Human Services, Saint Andrew Presbyterian Church, and the Marin County Cooperation Team are sponsoring the event.

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BayCityNews

All COVID Vaccinations to be Bivalent Vaccine to ‘Simplify’ Recommendations, FDA Says

The COVID-19 vaccine targeting the original strain of the virus as well as two substrains of the omicron variant will now be used for all vaccinations in the U.S., federal regulators said Tuesday. The bivalent vaccine has, until Tuesday’s changes to the emergency use authorizations for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, only been approved for use as a booster vaccine.

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Contra Costa Health Services nurse Jessica Lipscomb administering a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to Miguel Castro, 13, at a vaccination clinic in the gymnasium of Antioch Middle School in Antioch, Calif., on May 19, 2021. (Eli Walsh/Bay City News)
Contra Costa Health Services nurse Jessica Lipscomb administering a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to Miguel Castro, 13, at a vaccination clinic in the gymnasium of Antioch Middle School in Antioch, Calif., on May 19, 2021. (Eli Walsh/Bay City News)

By Eli Walsh
Bay City News

The COVID-19 vaccine targeting the original strain of the virus as well as two substrains of the omicron variant will now be used for all vaccinations in the U.S., federal regulators said Tuesday.

The bivalent vaccine has, until Tuesday’s changes to the emergency use authorizations for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, only been approved for use as a booster vaccine.

With Tuesday’s changes, U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials said they intend to simplify the recommended COVID vaccine schedules for most people.

Previously, the original COVID vaccine was approved as the first two doses for everyone ages 6 months and up, while the bivalent vaccine was used as a booster or as the third dose of a three-vaccine series for younger children.

As of Tuesday, the original COVID vaccine is no longer approved for use in the U.S. Unvaccinated people will only need to receive one dose of the bivalent vaccine to be considered vaccinated.

“At this stage of the pandemic, data support simplifying the use of the authorized mRNA bivalent COVID-19 vaccines and the agency believes that this approach will help encourage future vaccination,” said Dr. Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

Marks noted that nearly every U.S. resident age 5 and up now has COVID antibodies either from previous infection or from vaccination.

The FDA also approved a new booster dose for adults ages 65 and up, provided it has been at least four months since their previous vaccine dose, and those who have weakened immune systems if it has been at least two months since their last vaccine dose.

Most other U.S. residents who have received the bivalent booster are not currently eligible for another vaccine dose, but FDA officials intend to consider the necessity of further booster shots later this year.

COVID vaccines are available at primary care providers, retail pharmacies and some facilities operated by local health departments.

Copyright © 2023 Bay City News, Inc.  All rights reserved.  Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.

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Community

Food Insecurity, Hunger Expected to Soar After Cuts to Extra SNAP Benefits

Food security advocates, policymakers, and others had been warning of the dire consequences to those most in need if Congress chose to halt the extra allotments of SNAP benefits. Still, the Republican-led House let the COVID-era supplemental payments wind down at the end of February.

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Those closest to the problem say the consequences are already evident in the days since the extra allotments ended. The issues of hunger and food insecurity are being pushed to the forefront of the nation's myriad challenges.
Those closest to the problem say the consequences are already evident in the days since the extra allotments ended. The issues of hunger and food insecurity are being pushed to the forefront of the nation's myriad challenges.

By Barrington M. Salmon
NNPA Newswire

Food security advocates, policymakers, and others had been warning of the dire consequences to those most in need if Congress chose to halt the extra allotments of SNAP benefits. Still, the Republican-led House let the COVID-era supplemental payments wind down at the end of February.

Those closest to the problem say the consequences are already evident in the days since the extra allotments ended. The issues of hunger and food insecurity are being pushed to the forefront of the nation’s myriad challenges. The abrupt benefit cuts are estimated to affect more than 30 million people in 35 states.

On the frontlines, activists fighting the twin scourges of hunger and homelessness, like Anne Miskey, Kymone T. Freeman and Daniel del Pielago, contend that this and other crises were avoidable. Still, Congress, other elected officials, and society at large lack the political will or the compassion to eliminate what is essentially a man-made problem.

“Yet, although the SNAP extra allotments, stimulus funds and other assistance from the federal government helped stave off hunger and homelessness during the COVID crisis,” Kymone T. Freeman said, “the politicians have inexplicably allowed a critical lifeline to expire.”

Freeman said politicians are more concerned about staying in office and catering to the donor class and the wealthy instead of focusing on and delivering programs, projects and policies to working and middle-class Americans, particularly African Americans.

“This sounds like more austerity to me. The fact that they are cutting anything now is obscene and immoral. All it means is more hardship for the poor,” said Freeman, a social justice activist, playwright, and co-founder of WEACT Radio in Washington, DC. “This will increase crime, poverty, distress and misery. The cuts are contributing to hunger. Thirty percent of the children in Washington, DC, live in poverty. A budget is a moral document, and this is where their morality lies.”

Miskey, executive director of Union Station Homeless Services in Los Angeles, California, agreed.

“Much of the inflation and high prices we’re seeing is because of corporate greed. We’re expecting homelessness to skyrocket,” Miskey said. “During COVID, we rented all these hotels and shelters. We managed pretty well during COVID as local, state, and federal money poured in. But with the funding money gone, we’re trying to figure things out. The cost of living, rent, and evictions are going up. The cost of living is driving people into homelessness. Things are going to get pretty bad because of the cost of living.”

Miskey contends that separating food insecurity from gentrification, low wages, displacement, and homelessness is impossible. “COVID-19 has laid bare the structural, institutional, economic, and racial inequities that separate African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans from their white counterparts,” she said. Marginalized communities have been hit particularly hard by many challenges, many not naturally occurring.

“Healthcare workers, people of color, and immigrants are making horrible wages,” Miskey said. “They cannot afford afterschool care for kids, don’t have money for affordable housing, and struggle to make ends meet. This is a war against the poor. They tell people that they did this to themselves. Millions of people have no opportunity or are intentionally excluded from opportunities. Racism is the #1 factor for excluding people.”

The SNAP emergency allotments were designed to alleviate food insecurity and stimulate the US economy throughout the COVID pandemic public health emergency. According to DC Hunger Solutions, the cuts to SNAP benefits will affect more than 90,000 people in the District of Columbia. On average, when this “hunger cliff” hits, each SNAP participant will lose over $90 a month, DC Hunger Solutions officials explained on the website.

“As a result, average SNAP benefits will fall to a meager $6 a person a day. The “hunger cliff” will hit all age groups and all parts of the District of Columbia. The steepest cliff will be for many older adults who only qualify for the minimum SNAP benefit — dropping from $281 a month to $30,” staff said.

The “hunger cliff” — a perfect storm of a striking reduction of benefits in the face of high inflation and climbing grocery costs — will exacerbate food insecurity and hardship in the District of Columbia and elsewhere. The District will lose more than $14 million in benefits monthly. Emergency food providers can’t fill this gap. Even before the cuts, food banks, pantries, and soup kitchens have reported high demand for assistance, DC Hunger Solutions said.

All over America, Miskey said, people are vulnerable, have health problems, are aging, have been homeless for a long time, including seniors.

“It doesn’t take much: a single income, losing a spouse, an increase in the cost of housing. People are precariously housed. People have to put themselves in danger sometimes,” said Miskey. “People are stealing to survive. People need help, but needing help is seen as something weak or bad. Of course, the Republican Party sells the lottery mentality. People figure they’re going to be up there one day and dream that they’re going to get there.”

Daniel del Pielago agrees with Miskey that Republicans and others who support their ideas and agenda are committed to former President Donald Trump’s promise to dismantle the administrative state.

Del Pielago, organizing director of Empower DC, said these cuts and Republican plans to disembowel the social safety net — including Medicare and social security — is a deliberate policy choice aimed directly at the working class, low-income households, and the poor in this country.

“It’s part of this onslaught of safety net services being cut. I just heard from the city that they’re cutting the Emergency Rental Program 6½ months earlier than expected. And rents in May will go up 8.9% here in the District,” del Pielago said. “DC is super expensive, there are no livable wages for a certain population segment and there’s a sustained attack on low-income people. What we’re seeing in terms of the onslaught is the Trump effect coming into play. We have a bunch of people making these decisions which don’t benefit low-income residents and Black people. They were attempting, and now they’re having success.”

Miskey said as she views the challenges and devastation food insecurity has wrought on poor, near-poor, low-income, and middle-class Americans, she feels anger and frustration because most of this is and was avoidable.

“I think our systems have massively failed people,” she said. “I shouldn’t say that. I don’t think our system has failed. I think our system was set up to fail. They are set up to keep up the status quo, ensuring that those people of privilege and wealth maintain their privilege and wealth.”

Meanwhile, everyone else is blamed for their supposed character defects or failures because supposedly all the opportunities are out there if you grab them, Miskey explained.

“The fact is, our system creates massive barriers for opportunity and doesn’t allow huge chunks of our communities to actually access those things. That’s the shame of our system, the shame of our government. As I said before, we’re a system where we have a war on the poor, not a war on poverty.”

Matthew Desmond, a Princeton University sociologist and the director of the university’s Eviction Lab, said America has a poverty problem, and poverty and food insecurity are deeply intertwined.

“Poverty is measured at different income levels, but it is experienced as an exhausting piling on of problems. Poverty is chronic pain, on top of tooth rot, on top of debt collector harassment, on top of the nauseating fear of eviction,” said Desmond. “It is the suffocation of your talents and your dreams. It is death that comes early and often. From 2001 to 2014, the richest women in America gained almost three years of life while the poorest gained just 15 days. Far from a line, poverty is a tight knot of humiliations and agonies, and its persistence in American life should shame us.”

Desmond said housing assistance and food stamp programs are “effective and essential, protecting millions of families from hunger and homelessness each year,” he said in a March 16 column in the New York Times. “But the United States devotes far fewer resources to these programs, as a share of its gross domestic product, than other rich democracies, which places America in a disgraced class of its own on the world stage.”

That disgrace is illustrated in the stats showing that 33% of Americans live in households making less than $55,000, he said.

“Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line,” Desmond said. “And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021, meaning that they’d have to, at minimum, double their incomes just to reach the poverty line.”

He said Americans must commit to becoming poverty abolitionists to break this cycle.

“Like abolitionist movements against slavery or mass incarceration, abolitionism views poverty not as a routine or inevitable social ill but as an abomination that can no longer be tolerated,” he said. “And poverty abolitionism shares with other abolitionist movements the conviction that profiting from another’s pain corrupts us all. Ending poverty in America will require both short- and long-term solutions: strategies that stem the bleeding now, alongside more enduring interventions that target the disease and don’t just treat the symptoms.”

This includes appropriately addressing the housing crisis, which forces most poor renting families to devote at least 50% of their income to rent and utilities; immediately expanding housing vouchers to reduce the rent burden; pushing for “more transformative solutions” like scaling up the country’s public housing infrastructure; building out community land banks; and providing on-ramps to homeownership for low-income families.

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