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Every night since May last year, New York subway stations have been closed so an army of workers can disinfect the dirty platforms.
This could provide some reassurance to the thousands of New Yorkers who this week received the vaccine at a station operated by the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Emerging subway-to-subway sites are one of the ways U.S. health officials are trying to reach about 50 percent of Americans who have not yet been vaccinated, since once the blister inoculation campaign of the country is beginning to lose strength.
“It’s convenient and you only have one shot,” said Edie, a home cleaner who queued to get a hit from Johnson & Johnson at Penn Station on Thursday. “My friends have been asking me to do it and they all signed up online, but I didn’t have the patience for that.”
More than 1,100 New Yorkers received their vaccine Wednesday at an MTA center, from whom they received a free MetroCard for 7 days in return.
Gifts also offered elsewhere in the U.S.: In Ohio, the state governor this week said vaccinated residents will participate in a lottery to win $ 1 million.
The eye-catching initiatives are part of a broader push that includes vaccine buses, church clinics and amusement parks, and call campaigns, as the United States strives to get closer to the state’s immunity. herd so that it can reopen completely.
Almost half the American population has received at least one dose of vaccine, but with the pace of vaccinations slowing, attention is shifting away from the mass vaccination effort and is moving to hesitant or hard-to-reach communities.
Health experts believe that people who wanted to get vaccinated have already been looking for hits and that the second half of the vaccination effort should focus on hesitant and “busy vaccinators”: people who want to get vaccinated. but they have struggled to find time to go somewhere. Groups facing language barriers and difficulty traveling to inoculation centers are also being targeted.
“At first, it focused on how to make high-volume vaccines quickly,” said Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and member of Joe Biden’s former Covid-19 transition advisory group. “Now we are pivoting towards. . . people who are much harder to reach, [which] it requires a much more adapted, hyperlocal and culturally appropriate response. “
Some mass vaccination sites are running out as the strategy targets specific campaigns and knocks on people’s doors.
John Chen, CEO of Mascon Medical, which manages the Last Mile Vaccine Delivery program in Massachusetts, has helped organize clinics where people can come up and get vaccinated without pre-registration. They are found in churches, kitchens, malls and food manufacturing plants across the state.
He compared the tactics he uses to voting in elections: “Flyers, text messages, door calls. . . it has been incredibly effective.
People wait in line to get vaccinated at Penn Station in New York © Nikou Asgari / FT
A sign at Penn Station, New York, announces a free MetroCard for vaccinated people © Nikou Asgari / FT
“Some people can’t even write their own name, others can’t connect to the Internet and wouldn’t know how to sign up or don’t even have time to get to one of these mass vaccine locations,” Chen said.
To involve people from different backgrounds, health officials have recruited people from the communities they try to reach. Creole, Portuguese and Spanish language translators had helped Chen’s program vaccinate 20,000 people so far, he said.
The Baltimore Department of Health has also hired people from the communities the city wants to target, such as Latinos and African Americans. Connecting with insecure people is much easier when the person you’re talking to really understands their concerns, said Letitia Dzirasa, health commissioner at the Baltimore City Department of Health.
Last week, his group began knocking on the doors of vulnerable areas in order to increase vaccine uptake. “We are looking at areas of the city with the lowest vaccination coverage and the highest case rate to prioritize where we go first,” Dzirasa said.
Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control recommended the BioNTech / Pfizer vaccine for children ages 12 to 15, creating a new cohort of people online to be immunized.
Cove Island Marina and Lake Compounce Theme Park in Connecticut has hosted vaccine clinics created by the Community Health Center, a Connecticut-based nonprofit health care provider that plans to set up temporary clinics at summer camps. for kids too.
Mark Masselli, chief executive of CHC, said they were targeting “the working poor, who on weekends take time to go to the beach, and the 25-45 age group, a group where Covid does not it has had an impact ”.
In addition to subway clinics, vaccine buses travel through New York to reach restaurant workers and delivery drivers. Both efforts offer the unique J&J vaccine, so people don’t have to do it a second time.
Meanwhile, grassroots groups have emerged to fill the gaps left by state health officials. Rida Hamida used crowdfunding donations to offer free tacos to encourage Muslims in Orange County, California, to get vaccinated.
“The health agency. . . he had not understood our community at the time, “he said, adding that as few black Americans went to a temporary vaccination site in a church, they assumed Muslims would disassociate themselves.” to everybody”.
Hamida said he had knocked on doors and been in mosque parking lots and restaurants talking to Muslims and addressing their concerns about vaccination. “A lot of these people thought it wasn’t for them,” he said. “We talked to people about the places where they live, eat and shop, invited them to halal tacos and helped them understand that they are involved with the rest of the people.”
Encouraging vaccination of ethnic minorities and rural communities will be crucial for Joe Biden to achieve his goal of vaccinating at least 70% of American adults with a shot before July 4th.
“Mass vaccinations were race issues at home, they were showy and we did them well,” Masselli said. “Now we have to continue the entry.”
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