Vermont is first state to give vaccine priority to minority residents People wait for their turn to receive a COVID-19 vaccine at a high school in Hardwick, Vt. Vermont has become the first state in the nation to explicitly give people of color priority status for vaccinations. (Wilson Ring/Associated Press) Print States have tried with limited success to get COVID-19 vaccines to people of color, who have been disproportionately killed and hospitalized by the virus. Starting Thursday, Vermont explicitly gave Black adults and people from other minority communities priority status for vaccinations. Although other states have made efforts to get vaccines to people of color, Vermont is the first to offer them priority status, said Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of KFF.)