The nation's capital can't vaccinate its residents, part two

Here's why it's happening. D.C.'s health department is not without blame, but the bigger culprit turns out to be the federal Health and Human Services Department.

I live in Washington, D.C. I’m 63 years old and healthy, and I’m not a frontline worker. More than half the states have lowered their age thresholds below 65, but not D.C., which is still struggling to reach its elderly population. I do not expect to become eligible to receive the Covid vaccine until after May 1, when D.C., at the direction of the Biden administration, opens eligibility to all comers. It’s doubtful the District will be ready for this. My wife, who’s younger than me and has a qualifying medical condition, has been eligible for weeks to receive the vaccine in D.C., but she’s still waiting.

We’ve both now given up on getting vaccinated in the jurisdiction where we live and are focusing on getting appointments in nearby Maryland, where it appears we’re eligible despite not being state residents. Maryland isn’t exactly advertising this, but a sort of quiet exodus is underway right now as D.C. residents pour across the state line to get their jab. The Baltimore Sun reported last week that out-of-staters outnumbered Marylanders at mass vaccination site in Charles County.

Lest you think this is mere bellyaching from a white guy who won’t check his privilege, as the kids say, allow me to share my outrage that D.C. is doing an even worse job vaccinating its low-income population, which is at greater risk of death or serious illness from Covid. I live in wealthy Ward 3, where, the Washington Post reported last week, 12.2 percent were vaccinated. In the city’s two poorest wards, Wards 7 and 8, the comparable percentages are 5.4 percent and 3.9 percent, respectively.

You hear a lot about African Americans being reluctant to get vaccinated because of the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee experiments of the 1930s. And indeed, a December poll by the D.C. Health Department showed that an alarming 44 percent of African Americans in D.C. said they would not take the vaccine. But a lack of proper outreach appears to be the bigger problem.

The main way to sign up for Covid vaccinations in D.C. is through its vaccination portal. But one-quarter of District residents don’t have internet access, and of course they’re concentrated in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. So the D.C. health department decided to take out ads in a few community newspapers. These are free, and the thinking was that they could be used to cross the digital divide.

But when the print ad appeared earlier this month, illustrated with a photograph of an African American grocery worker wearing a surgical mask, they forgot to include a phone number to make a vaccine appointment. “The Covid Vaccine: As essential as you are,” the ad read. Only four other pieces of information were included: the D.C. health department logo, Mayor Muriel Bowser’s name, a hashtag (#GetVaccinated D.C.), and a URL (coronavirus.dc.gov/vaccine). What use were a hashtag and a URL to a person with no access to the internet?

I don’t mean to be too hard on D.C. government. The main culprit in this fiasco is actually the federal Health and Human Services Department, which made a bad blunder when it allocated D.C.’s share of available vaccines. And the bad efficiency statistic for the District that I cited in an earlier post about this problem turns out to be questionable (though even when corrected, D.C.’s efficiency still isn’t especially good).

The Atlantic asked me to dig a bit deeper into all this, and the result is this lengthier reported piece. The ultimate problem, as proves so often the case in stories about bad outcomes in the District of Columbia, is that D.C. is not a state. When a federal agency screws up in a way that hurts the District, that agency has little reason to care because there’s no congressional delegation to scream bloody murder and threaten to cut its budget. (D.C.’s single nonvoting House delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, can vote in committee, but no D.C. delegate has ever sat on the House Appropriations Committee.) This lack of representation will result in more people dying of a deadly disease in the nation’s capital. The House voted to make D.C. a state in June, but the measure is going to die in the Senate. It’s past time to get this fixed.

Please do read my Atlantic piece. It’s got lots of fresh reporting.