Community clinics increasingly involved in helping people get vaccinated.

Clinics across U.S. bring expertise, community connections to vaccine drive In the days before an east Los Angeles COVID-19 vaccination site opened in a Latino neighborhood that was hard-hit by the pandemic, people flooded California's online booking system to snap up appointments. The software accepted hundreds of ineligible residents from wealthy... Lisa Baertlein U.S.

Reuters

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President Joe Biden announced in February that he was turning to the expertise and deep community connections of the more than 1,300 such clinics across the country. As part of a strategy to increase vaccinations in communities devastated by coronavirus, administration officials reached out to clinics in every state, where staff know that the impoverished Latinos and Blacks they serve are being vaccinated at about half the rate of whites - despite being at least twice as likely to die from COVID-19.

Reuters spoke with a dozen clinics in Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Miami and Birmingham, Alabama, that are getting vaccines into the arms of people who have trouble securing appointments via overrun internet booking systems or getting to mass vaccination sites due to lack of technological savvy, time or transportation.

The clinics offer low- to no-cost medical services to almost 30 million people across the country – including essential workers who harvest, sell and cook food; clean homes and hospitals; and care for children, the disabled and elderly. In its first four days, St. John’s inoculated 1,400 people in east Los Angeles  - among them food cart vendors, housekeepers and gardeners,  Jim Mangia, chief executive of St. John’s Well Child & Family Center said. ..

The community clinics use robust patient data to bolster vaccination campaigns. Their staff are also trusted healthcare providers who can help dispel hesitancy toward the vaccine in vulnerable communities that is rooted in distrust of the government and historical episodes of medical exploitation.

AltaMed Health Services, one of the nation’s largest community clinic operators, uses records from its roughly 300,000 Southern California patients to create lists of eligible patients. Dr. Sherrill Brown, its medical director, said staff then reach out via text and email.

“We try to bombard them with the information so that they have as many opportunities as they can to schedule an appointment,” Brown said. ...

Philadelphia’s Public Health Management Corporation identified 12,000 vaccine-eligible patients at its five federally funded clinics and added a special phone tree for vaccine calls....