A year since the first Pfizer and Moderna doses were administered in the U.S., large racial vaccination gaps remain.
A handful of places, some with large Black populations, such as New York City and Washington, D.C., are close to parity among races and ethnicities. Several states in New England, which have generally high vaccination rates, are also leaders in vaccine equity.
But in nearly half of U.S. states, Black and Hispanic vaccination rates lag White ones by 10 percentage points or more. Many of those are in the South and Southwest, respectively.
For 10 months, Bloomberg News has tracked the demographics of vaccines in almost all U.S. states and some cities. With almost 75% of Americans having received at least one shot of a Covid-19 vaccine and vaccination rates slowing overall, we’ve decided to make this our last update.
Our tracker has data through mid-December from 46 states, D.C. and two cities that cover 95.8% of people and 93.8% of doses administered, with race or ethnicity information available for more than 183 million vaccine recipients.
Mississippi has had the most impressive record in closing the Black vaccine gap, from being the worst state in the nation to now having a higher Black than White vaccination rate. Other Southern states such as Alabama and Louisiana have also made considerable progress in inoculating their Black populations, though they otherwise rank poorly due to low overall vaccine rates.
Some of the biggest decreases in the Hispanic vaccine gap have come in places with large Hispanic populations, such as Texas, Florida, California and New York City.
Now that kids as young as 5 can receive the vaccine, racial gaps should continue to close, particularly among Hispanic people, who account for a quarter of 5- to 11-year-olds.
Our tracker looks at people who’ve received at least one dose, but does not capture who is most protected with either two-doses or a booster shot. Data compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that Hispanic people currently make up a disproportionate share of those getting first and second doses. They, along with Black people, are getting booster shots at higher rates than White Americans, too. These trends should boost vaccine equity, at least in the short run.
To date, fewer than half of states have vaccinated a majority of their Black or Hispanic residents, compared to more than 40 that have given at least one dose to a majority of White people.
Only Oregon and Vermont have reached more than three-quarters of their Black and Hispanic populations, respectively, according to available data. Five states have passed that milestone for White people—Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont—compared to more than a dozen who’ve done as well reaching Asian communities.
Data on vaccinations among Native American and Native Alaskan groups are excluded because the Indian Health Service, which is coordinating much of the rollout, hasn’t reported state-by-state numbers. Alaska is the only state not relying on the IHS, and has vaccinated more than 71% of that group.
Federal and state officials had said they made it a priority to get those most at risk vaccinated in the earliest months of the vaccination campaign. Early in the pandemic, Covid infection rates in certain minority groups outpaced those in White communities; death rates for some Black counties were triple those of comparable White ones.
Even with wide availability of shots and near-universal eligibility requirements, reaching the unvaccinated has proven difficult. President Joe Biden has blamed rampant misinformation on social media platforms for high hesitancy rates, though the reasons people don’t yet have their shots vary widely.
With more mandates coming from companies, cities and the federal government, vaccination gaps should further close.
As of December, the state of Vermont scored best on data completeness, followed by Maryland, Indiana, Nebraska and Tennessee. On the other end of the data quality spectrum is Hawaii, with closer to 50% of data coverage for race—the state doesn’t report ethnicity—and North Dakota.
Reasons for continued variations in data quality remain unclear. Providers are supposed to collect demographic information, but might not always ask for or record it correctly. Some people prefer not to share their background or might not understand why it’s important to do so, according to Nirav Shah, the director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who spoke during a press briefing in February. Mississippi, for its part, had identified issues with sending electronic health records into the state registry at the start of the vaccination drive.
While data quality has generally improved, the continued evidence of inequity is a clarion call for better, more complete data on race and ethnicity. Without it, we won’t be able to fully assess how well—or how poorly—the U.S. is serving all of its residents.