Pitt researchers find Black Americans nationwide must travel farther to get covid vaccine

A study from researchers at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Pharmacy shows that Black residents in many regions of the U.S. will have farther to travel to receive a covid-19 vaccine — creating a potential accessibility issue.

“Pharmacies should be easy to access, but in some places there’s low capacity or low density, and the floodgates are opening,” said Lucas Berenbrok, assistant professor at the School of Pharmacy and first author of the study. “When barriers are present, like driving times, there needs to be a plan to reach those people. We can’t forget about them.”

Beginning in December, Berenbrok and Inmaculada Hernandez, an assistant professor of pharmacy at Pitt and senior author of the study, worked with West Health Policy Center and began mapping nearly 70,000 potential vaccine distribution sites, including community pharmacies, federally-qualified health centers, rural health clinics and outpatient hospital departments. Then, the researchers compared the distance between Americans’ places of residence and the sites.

The researchers found that in 69 counties nationwide, Black residents were significantly more likely than white residents to live more than a mile from their closest vaccination site, and will face a longer drive time. Those 69 counties included 23 that contained major urban centers — including Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, New Orleans and others.

Looking at more rural counties, Hernandez said there were more than 300 counties in which Black residents were more likely to live over 10 miles away from their nearest distribution — about 90 of which had statistically significant differences. She said states including Nebraska, Montana and Kansas have a high number of rural counties with this issue.

Three-quarters of the counties with access disparities also have high rates of covid infections, the researchers found.

In Allegheny County, almost all residents are within 10 miles. About 56% of the population is within a one-mile distance, and 87% are within two miles. Compared to many areas, that’s not bad, Berenbrok said – but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still barriers to access.

“Ten miles doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing for everybody,” he said. “Ten miles for someone with a car is a lot more accessible than 10 miles for someone who doesn’t have a car and has to get on a bus, has to walk, has to find public transportation.”

And public transportation may be even more unreliable now, Hernandez said, due to pandemic concerns. She added there may be additional barriers both visible and invisible, including roadways, municipal lines or other boundaries, that deter vaccine access within Allegheny County and other counties throughout the country.

Calculating the distance between communities and vaccine distribution sites is just one of several academic studies occurring among Pittsburgh universities, focusing specifically on racial and ethnic disparities in vaccine distribution. Carnegie Mellon University researchers are surveying Facebook users to look for differences in vaccine access, and another Pitt study is examining vaccine misinformation and mistrust in certain communities.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 5% of the 13 million Americans vaccinated in the first month of the rollout were Black. But in Pennsylvania, data relating to racial and ethnic disparities in the vaccine distribution is severely limited – the race of more than 228,000 of the 671,820 partially-vaccinated Pennsylvanians is marked as “unknown” on the state’s data dashboard. That means data is missing for about 34% of all residents who have received their first dose.

Hernandez said they quickly noticed variations among different areas in their public health infrastructure. Some don’t have enough facilities, some have facilities that are too far away from residents and some have both problems at the same time.

She said the original goal of the latest study was to act as a guide or blueprint for entities arranging vaccine clinic locations. There is open access to the data, meaning state and local health departments could use it to make decisions about improving vaccine accessibility.

“We wanted this data to be used as a planning tool,” Hernandez said. “We’re mapping access to facilities that could serve for covid vaccine administration, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them have or will receive the vaccine. So we wanted this to be used more to inform public health officials in figuring out where additional resources are needed to reach an equitable distribution.”

Berenbrok said he hopes the data could lead to solutions, like bringing mobile vaccination clinics to communities where more people have to drive further.

“Our maps show the potential administration sites – it doesn’t actually show where the vaccine is available and where it is at this point,” he said. “And I think that highlights how we can’t rely on our existing infrastructure to be able to reach everyone in this equitable way the federal government has put their stake in the ground for.”