I shvitzed a bit about the issue of vaccine equity almost exactly one year ago.
Funnily enough, I linked to this story (different link, same topic, the original is paywalled now), which directly addresses the OP.
All of your links are still paywalled.
Not for me.
The first link is to the SDMB, so it definitely is not paywalled.
The second is to the Miami Herald, and is not paywalled to me.
Making sure all of your citizens have equal access to life saving medication isn’t easy, it’s hard. It takes work to design a system that doesn’t send vaccines to the wealthy and well served populations first, just because it’s easier to get it to them first.
I’m guessing this is because the first wave of vaccines did not include essential workers. It was for health care workers and the elderly exclusively. The elderly population in Florida is mostly non-Hispanic White.
The initial vaccine sites in my area were not at Publix. I’m talking about late December of 2020 and the first couple weeks of January 2021. We had a couple ad-hoc sites set up in a couple parking lots. They didn’t offer appointments and only a limited number of doses were distributed before they stopped for the day. There was availability to vaccinate a small fraction of the population that was eligible for the first round. At the time, Trump and DeSantos were touting the vaccines hard. There were so many eligible that anyone who actually obtained their vaccine would have had to wait in their car overnight. We had reports of elderly people being cold and dehydrated.
A person under 30 (including a person of color under 30) could only have obtained a vaccine at that stage if they were eligible as a health care worker. The hospitals vaccinated their own employees, however. Other healthcare workers would have had to sit in traffic overnight and through a good part of the morning to beat out the elderly for a vaccine.
~Max
I’m not a doctor, but I should think that the idea to get as many people vaccinated as possible is a laudable goal. Herd immunity, and all.
Map of Florida population density:
florida population map - Bing images
Map of Florida Publix locations:
publix_store_map.jpg (1382×513) (netdna-ssl.com)
Seems like they track pretty closely.
I didn’t say to reduce the number of vaccinations. I said that you don’t have to choose the most convenient method of distributing vaccinations when that method underserves certain populations. Do the extra work to ensure that the available vaccinations don’t get concentrated in easy to service areas that cater to the white population.
Or, put another way, we shouldn’t make it hard for minorities to get life saving medication, because it’s easier to get that medication to white people. Especially when that ease of service is the end result of decades of institutional racism.
Let me throw one more thing into the mix. Remember that the first vaccines had to be refrigerated - REALLY refrigerated. Availability of refrigeration units may have have also had an effect in using a certain store chain instead of throwing it open to every chain.
I would say, rather, that they were incorrect, but founded. The legacy of the Tuskegee experiment lives on.
Why do all of the sites have to be in stores owned by the same company? Why not, say, for each county, divide the county’s population by 100 thousand, or whatever, and then pick the n largest stores in that county?
At the time, Pfizer thought their vaccine had to be stored in ultracold freezers, at -70℃ or less. Moderna could be, and still is, stored at -20℃, which is more or less a standard temperature for storing vaccines.
The ultracold freezer requirement for Pfizer limited the locations that could safely store the vaccines. You’re not likely to need equipment like that in small hospitals or clinics, and they’re far too expensive and too little used for a doctor’s office or pharmacy to have one.
The Pfizer recommendation has been changed a bit since then: for long term storage it still needs to be kept below -62℃. If it’ll be used within a week or two, it can be stored in a standard freezer between -25℃ and -15℃. That means it can be stored at a more centralized location with the right equipment and then distributed every week or so to the locations with more standard equipment.
They don’t. But since they have twice the number of stores than the next largest chain, both measures would probably lead to the same locations.