Carlos Moreno/KCUR
toggle caption Carlos Moreno/KCUR
Yvette Richards, director of community connection at St. James United Methodist in Kansas City, checks temperatures before Sunday morning services. The church is hosting vaccination clinics and holding socially-distanced services after shutting down for much of the pandemic. Carlos Moreno/KCUR
Throughout the COVID-19 vaccination effort, public health officials and politicians have insisted that providing shots equitably across racial and ethnic groups is a top priority.
But it s been left up to states to decide how to do that and to collect racial and ethnic data on vaccinated individuals, so states can track how well they re doing reaching all groups. The gaps and inconsistencies in the data have made it difficult to understand who s actually getting shots.
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Temperature checks and limited attendance are two of the safeguards at in-person Sunday services that recently resumed at St. James United Methodist Church in Kansas City, Missouri.
Addressing the mistrust and health care access problems faced by African Americans will take more than big vaccination events, some experts say.
Throughout Missouri s COVID-19 vaccination efforts, data have shown wide disparities in the vaccination rates of different racial and ethnic groups and while recent weeks have shown some improvement, many gaps remain.
Although vaccine hesitancy runs high in many African American neighborhoods, critics say the state’s inadequate efforts to reach those vulnerable communities have added to issues of mistrust and lack of health care access that are keeping vaccination rates low.