Check out our latest report, Carrying Equity in COVID-19 Vaccination Forward: Guidance Informed by Communities of Color, for insights on COVID-19 vaccination rollout challenges in communities across the countries.

Some media updates from our local teams:

FDA approval of the Covid-19 vaccine could mean more people will get vaccinated for an unexpected reason. Three in ten unvaccinated adults said they would be more likely to get vaccinated if one of the vaccines moves to full approval, according to a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation. (CNN, 8/10/21)

The Choice to Vaccinate Has Never Been Free. Common parlance, including the ire of at least a few public officials, might lead some to assume “the unvaccinated” are a self-selecting, selfish gaggle of anti-vaxxers. But the truth is that when compared to those have received a Covid vaccine, those who have not are more likely to be children, working-age adults who earn less than $40,000 per year, Black or Hispanic folks, and the uninsured. (The Nation, 8/11/21)

See also: No, the Unvaccinated Aren’t All Just Being Difficult (New York Times, 8/6/21)

‘Joe Rogan Is Getting This Completely Wrong,’ Says The Scientist Who Conducted The Vaccine Study. Joe Rogan’s public misrepresentation of a 2015 vaccine study has gone viral. His misunderstanding of the study leads Rogan to wrongly conclude that vaccinating people against COVID-19 will increase the chances of some hyper-virulent mutation. (Forbes, 8/8/21)

Relax, America: The Vaccines Are Still Working. Pfizer says its vaccine becomes less effective with time. Moderna says its doesn’t. And Johnson & Johnson says its vaccine holds up against the Delta variant, but not everyone agrees. For anyone perplexed by what this all means for your own safety, the main takeaway hasn’t changed: The vaccines are still miraculous. And they’re still doing exactly what we need them to do. (The Atlantic, 8/6/21)

‘Everybody I Know Is Pissed Off.’ The vaccinated, across party lines, have kind of had it with the unvaccinated, an array of new polls suggests. While most state and national GOP leaders are focused on defending the rights of unvaccinated Americans, new polling shows that the large majority of vaccinated adults—including a substantial portion of Republicans—support tougher measures against those who have refused COVID-19 shots. (The Atlantic, 8/12/21)

The GOP’s top vaccine skeptics have lost the plot. Increasingly, prominent Republican skeptics of vaccines and mandates are going well beyond raising concerns. In the service of denouncing mask and vaccine mandates, they’re trading in misinformation, faulty absolutist logic and other highly dangerous rhetoric that suggest the vaccines themselves don’t really work. (Washington Post, 8/11/21)

See also: The Covid Misinformation on Social Media Is Coming From Inside Congress (Rolling Stone, 8/11/21)

Vaccine mandates are coming. Catholics have no moral reason to oppose them. Individuals who object to such a mandate and seek an exemption, due to moral qualms that have already been addressed by the church’s highest magisterial authorities, are exhibiting scrupulosity: the unreasonable fear that they are committing a sin when they are not. While, according to Aquinas and as the church continues to teach, every individual should follow their conscience, even if their conscience is in error, doing so does not excuse one’s subsequent behavior if one’s conscience is misinformed by voluntary ignorance. (America Magazine, 8/10/21)

Where to Get a Covid-19 Vaccine, and What to Expect. States, territories, and our one state-like district (DC) all have wide latitude to set their own Covid-19 policies and procedures. Advice and paths to a Covid-19 vaccine are going to differ based on which part of the US you live in, but we've put together a guide that should give you an accurate overview of how to get the jab. (Wired, 8/6/21)

More minority patients getting vaccinated at community health centers, say federal officials. Federally funded community health centers have administered nearly 14 million doses of coronavirus vaccines, including about 9 million doses to minority patients. Nearly half of the doses have been administered been through the Health Center COVID-19 Vaccine Program, an initiative overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services. (Washington Post, 8/9/21)

See also: To Advance Health Equity During COVID-19 and Beyond, Elevate and Support Community Health Workers (JAMA, 7/29/21)

Public health experts urge local mask and vaccine requirements as schools reopen across the country. The push comes as coronavirus cases in the United States rose 40 percent in the past week, while COVID-related hospitalizations rose 36 percent in the same period. In addition, coronavirus cases among children are on the rise — with the school year set to begin in many districts across the country. (Washington Post, 8/11/21)

Kansas, Missouri could take months to reach key vaccination threshold as delta surges. An analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccination data by The Star suggests it will still take months — even at the more recent, accelerated pace of shots — to get at least one dose to 70% of the population in both states. Kansas could take 128 days and Missouri 141 days to reach what has previously been thought to be a possible herd immunity threshold, based on the average daily number of first doses in late July. (Yahoo! News, 8/8/21)

Asian Americans have high vaccine rates, but it hasn’t come easy, nonprofit groups say. “If people are looking at these numbers and saying, ‘Asians are just easier, more compliant, more willing to get vaccinated,’ that’s just not true,” Jack Cheng, Chinatown Service Center's director of operations, told NBC Asian America. “Most of our seniors had no resources to do that. It has to be the strong work of community-based organizations.” (NBC, 8/11/21)

Don't let CureVac's COVID-19 vaccine supply chain go to waste. CureVac’s vaccine may have failed, but the company lined up the same sort of complicated ingredients and kitchens needed to cook up the five-star messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines of Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna that have been effective at protecting against the worst effects of the disease. (Peterson Institute for International Economics, 8/9/21)

Frontline service workers left out of the vaccine mandate trend. Requiring vaccines is more complicated in sectors like retail and agriculture, where employers risk losing workers in a tight labor market and vaccine enforcement could be expensive. Some labor leaders who represent low-wage service workers also have pushed back against strict mandates. (POLITICO, 8/8/21)

See also: New York’s Anti-Covid Maitre D’s (Bloomberg, 8/11/21)

Fake COVID-19 vaccination cards worry college officials. Both faculty and students at dozens of schools interviewed by The Associated Press say they are concerned about how easy it is to get fake vaccine cards. Across the internet, a cottage industry has sprung up to accommodate people who say they won’t get vaccinated for either personal or religious reasons. (AP News, 8/9/21)

See also: The Vaccine Cards Are the Wrong Size (The Atlantic, 8/10/21)

Why Only 28 Percent of Young Black New Yorkers Are Vaccinated. “Since when does America give anything good to Black people first?” said an activist, Hawk Newsome, a 44-year-old Black Lives Matter leader who is unvaccinated. This vaccination gap is emerging as the latest stark racial disparity in an epidemic full of them. Epidemiologists say they expect this third wave will hit Black New Yorkers especially hard. (New York Times, 8/12/21)

See also: Far Rockaway Has the Lowest Vaccination Rate in the City. Here’s Why (Documented NY, 8/10/21)

Medicine’s Disability Blind Spot: Vaccine Roll-out, Privilege, and Access. Disabled lives have long been overlooked, as the very systems and designs of medicine cater to the able-bodied. No where has this been more apparent than in the present pandemic crisis and the vaccine roll-out, which has—inadvertently or otherwise—privileged abled (and frequently White, middle/upper class) people. (BMJ, 8/12/21)

An Alabama Woman's Neighborly Vaccination Campaign. Panola follows the efforts of a retired Black woman, Dorothy Oliver, and the county commissioner, Drucilla Russ-Jackson, to bring the vaccine to her isolated hamlet of about four hundred residents in rural Alabama, and to persuade enough of her community to take it. “I just felt like I had to do it because the government, nobody does enough in this area,” she says. “This area here is majority Black. Kind of puts you on the back burner. That’s just it. I mean, you don’t have to put nothing else with that. That’s just it. I don’t have to elaborate on that one.” (New Yorker, 8/11/21)

Homeland Security: Noncitizens' Barriers to Healthcare Thwart COVID-19 Progress. To better control COVID-19, the agency says, public-health strategies must “mitigate” barriers noncitizens face, including exclusionary state policies, insurance costs and fear that seeking vaccines could lead to deportation or other family crises. (Center for Public Integrity, 8/6/21)

Vaccine Mandates Are Lawful, Effective and Based on Rock-Solid Science. Are these mandates lawful and ethical? The short answer is emphatically yes. And there is strong behavioral science evidence that mandates will be highly effective. (Scientific American, 8/5/21)

COVID vaccines to be required for military under new US plan. Members of the U.S. military will be required to get the COVID-19 vaccine beginning next month under a plan laid out by the Pentagon Monday and endorsed by President Joe Biden. In memos distributed to all troops, top Pentagon leaders said the vaccine is a necessary step to maintain military readiness. (AP News, 8/9/21)

See also: Nearly 300,000 More Federal Health Workers Are Ordered To Be Vaccinated (NPR, 8/12/21)

AFT President Randi Weingarten Backs COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates for Teachers. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said Sunday that she personally supports her members working with school districts to create vaccine mandates, an announcement that represents a significant shift from national teachers’ unions previous hesitance to endorse such requirements. (Education Week, 8/8/21)

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A snort or a jab? Scientists debate potential benefits of intranasal Covid-19 vaccines. Can they be made? Probably. Will they do what we want them to do, if they are made? Possibly. Is there still room for this type of next-generation product, given the record number of Covid vaccines that have already been put into use? Potentially. Will it be difficult to get them through development? Likely. (STAT, 8/10/21)

F.D.A. Aiming to Speed Extra Vaccine Doses for Immunocompromised Patients. The regulatory move would mean that people with impaired immune responses who need an extra shot, such as certain cancer patients, would be able to get one legally. That is a safer alternative than patients seeking shots on their own, as many now do, several experts said. (New York Times, 8/6/21)

Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccines against the B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant. Only modest differences in vaccine effectiveness were noted with the delta variant as compared with the alpha variant after the receipt of two vaccine doses. Absolute differences in vaccine effectiveness were more marked after the receipt of the first dose. This finding would support efforts to maximize vaccine uptake with two doses among vulnerable populations. (New England Journal of Medicine, 8/12/21)

COVID-19 Vaccines While Pregnant or Breastfeeding. COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for all people aged 12 years and older, including people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to get pregnant now, or might become pregnant in the future. Pregnant and recently pregnant people are more likely to get severely ill with COVID-19 compared with non-pregnant people. (CDC, 8/11/21)

See also: Vaccinating During Pregnancy Has Become Even More Urgent As ICU Beds Fill Up (NPR, 8/11/21)

Use of COVID-19 Vaccines After Reports of Adverse Events Among Adult Recipients of Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) and mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna): Update from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — United States, July 2021. Continued COVID-19 vaccination will prevent COVID-19 morbidity and mortality far exceeding GBS, TTS, and myocarditis cases expected. Information about rare adverse events should be disseminated to providers, vaccine recipients, and the public. (CDC, 8/13/21)