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0 pointsthrowaaskjdfh4y ago0 comments

EDIT: I was mistaken here, corrected by a response below.

I don't think there was a way for the public health authorities to create an explicit rule about neighborhood residency without inviting lawsuits. The best they could do is place vaccination centers in more convenient locations for underserved communities, and hope that it could raise the rate of vaccination in the vicinity.

I think there were people assuming that if it wasn't against the explicit rules to commute there to be vaccinated, it must be OK, even though it might (in the event of limited supply) undermine the effort to raise vaccination rates in that specific area.

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hamandcheese4y ago

> I don't think there was a way for the public health authorities to create an explicit rule about neighborhood residency without inviting lawsuits.

Zuckerberg Hospital in SF was offering vaccinations to targeted zip codes ahead of schedule, and they were verifying residency.

throwaaskjdfhOP4y ago

That's interesting, thanks for the correction. I was extrapolating from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/health/white-people-covid... but that might not have been applicable here.

ping_pong4y ago

This pretty much summarizes how it was taken advantage of:

https://archive.is/Z55Oe

lawnchair_larry4y ago

Glad it was "taken advantage of", racism has no place here. Disgusting that people think this is ok.

Devon643274y ago

They didn't set up a clinic and stick a "Colored folks only" sign out front.

At the county or state level, they looked at the data and identified that Black and Latino populations were not being vaccinated at the same rate as white populations, and also recognized that the pandemic has disproportionately affected those same populations.

So they committed resources to establish more clinics in areas with high concentrations of the given populations and may have waived certain documentation requirements that are historically more challenging for them to acquire.

The result being that people of means, predominantly white people, took time off of work and travelled long distances to take advantage of the situation. Taking the place of a non-zero number of residents that were the intended recipients.

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tdeck4y ago

To be fair, this is a reasonable assumption based on past experience. The government normally has no shortage of rules - it literally governs us. It's not unreasonable for some people to assume that this is a disorganized or inconsistent rollout rather than a form of social engineering meant to narrow the eligibility guidelines.

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