Two new COVID vaccination vans hit Sarasota-Manatee streets heraldtribune.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from heraldtribune.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
But Sarasota-Manatee activists can’t exactly bring in a celebrity like Rodrigo to convince the community to get vaccinated. Instead, they’re relying on more grassroots tactics, like pop-up clinics, incentives and individual conversations. And despite their best efforts, things are slowing down, admits Trevor Harvey, president of the Sarasota County Branch of the NAACP and member of the regional “Shots in Arms” Coalition.
“Everybody is kind of at a standstill and struggling, because people feel that they’re at a point now where they can make these decisions for themselves,” he said. “They don’t need anybody knocking on their doors, because the opportunity is there.”
At St. Armands Key Lutheran Church, Director of Operations and Minister of Music Michael Bodnyk worked with church leaders to get a vaccine clinic organized for “quite a while,” he said. A parishioner who worked at Hedges HealthMart Pharmacy in Sarasota made a connection, and the pharmacy offered to supply and administer vaccines and handle registration for an event at the church.
“In our demographic of parishioners, there are a lot of older people with compromised immune systems. Getting the vaccine was important to a lot of them,” Bodnyk said. “Obviously, we wanted to be helpful in any way we could.”
Elizabeth Djinis
Correction: The vaccine event was held in north Sarasota. An earlier version of this story s headline incorrectly said it was held in Newtown.
The Florida Department of Health in Sarasota County hosted its first pop-up vaccine clinic in north Sarasota Sunday geared toward vaccinating communities of color.
Roughly 400 Black and Hispanic people were vaccinated Sunday at Light of the World International Church near Myrtle Street and U.S. 41. The event was spurred in part by community activists who called for better vaccine access for some of the most vulnerable members of the community. Rather than going through the county’s Everbridge registration system, a group of community leaders compiled a list of local people of color who were over 65 or frontline health care providers who had not been vaccinated. Those people were called and given appointments for Sunday.
Sarasota County advocates want better COVID-19 vaccine equity
Elizabeth Djinis
Sarasota community advocates are working to ensure that communities of color – who have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 – have equal access to the vaccine. Right now, the numbers show they don’t.
The number of white people in Sarasota County who have received at least one dose of the vaccine still far outweighs the number of Black people, according to state data from Friday morning.
As of Friday, almost 58,000 people have received at least one dose of vaccine in Sarasota County. Only 570 of those were Black, mostly from a Sarasota Memorial Hospital vaccination clinic in Newtown last month, where about 400 people were vaccinated.