‘In the absence of education and information, white and privileged people got the vaccine.’
Some states have designed strategies to give vaccine priority to people of color, who have been disproportionately impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. In California, one program gives out vaccine access codes that allow people to make appointments on the state’s scheduling website. These access codes are meant to be reserved for Black and Latinx people and distributed through community organizations.
Unfortunately, the codes are being misused by people outside of these communities.
Writing in The Bold Italic, Amanda Spiller describes her experience receiving one of these codes from a friend and using it to book an appointment, not knowing that the code was reserved for Black and Latinx people — not those from her own “privileged Bay Area network.” When she realized, she immediately thought to cancel her appointment but worried that it would mean her dose would go to waste. Officials told her that vaccines did not get wasted in the vast majority of cases, despite what many people in her network believed.
“Here’s the takeaway,” she writes. “The rumor of wasted vaccines is a myth that allows privileged communities to skip the line guilt-free. In the absence of education and information, white and privileged people got the vaccine.”
Read her story on The Bold Italic:
