The biggest vaccination gap isn't based on race or partisanship. It's based on class.

[cinematicdiversions]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/24/briefing/vaccination-class-gap-us.html


It is common to hear about two different demographic groups that are hesitant to receive a Covid-19 vaccination: Republican voters and racial minorities, especially Black and Latino Americans.

The two groups seem to have different motivations. For Republicans, the attitude is connected to a general skepticism of government and science. For Black and Hispanic Americans, it appears to stem from the country’s legacy of providing substandard medical treatment, and sometimes doing outright harm, to minorities.

These ideas all have some truth to them. But they also can obscure the fact that many unvaccinated Republicans and minorities have something in common: They are working class. And there is a huge class gap in vaccination behavior.

As you can see, working-class members of every group are less likely to have received a vaccine and more likely to be skeptical. “No matter which of these groups we looked at, we see an education divide,” Mollyann Brodie, who oversees the Kaiser surveys, told me. In some cases, different racial groups with the same education levels — like Black and white college graduates — look remarkably similar.



Class in study after study is a bigger divider in outcomes than race. Yet we focus on one when the science is telling us to focus on the other.

[Liberty Belle]

1. It's also geography. In our area, there have been almost no vaccine clinics in rural areas

and not surprisingly the rural areas have the lowest vaccination rates.

They had Cal Fire go out maybe one day to offer shots at the fire station but most people didn't know about it, and some don't have the means to drive an hour to get to a super center vaccination clinic or know where else to go.

[Johnny2X2X]

2. Outreach will be needed to get us to where we need to be

I don't think a lot of people realize the poverty that exists in rural America and how it's as bad or worse in many rural communities than it is in inner cities. You've got ghost towns with no large employers throughout much of rural Michigan, a state I am from. There's just nothing in many of these places. Getting to town is difficult for the very poor. When people get sick they often get shipped hundreds of miles to go to a hospital that can care for severe illnesses.

Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Tennessee, and some of the states lagging most in vaccinations are also the poorest states in the country. Rural parts of those states have poverty the likes of which you usually have to go to a 3rd world country to see. We cannot forget these people and assume they're a bunch of Trump loving anti Vaxxers.