- As LA County emerges as the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, church leaders and political officials are forced to confront the cities long standing health equity issue, as doctors struggle to get the residents of a historically marginalized community vaccinated.
- In 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. It was only a matter of time before Los Angeles County became the epicenter.
For Angelenos, the situation was hitting particularly close to home. Everybody knew somebody who either died or had gotten extremely sick from COVID-19. When the vaccines rolled out, Pastor Alvin Stafford, of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, recognized early on that even though the vaccine was being made readily available everywhere else, in the community of Watts, however, it was nowhere to be found. Sadly, many historically marginalized communities in South LA were being left behind in the vaccine roll out.
He offered one of the first pop up vaccine clinics at his church for anyone in the community. Pastor Stafford continued to partner with community health organizations to offer pop up vaccine clinics and education surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine. A groundswell began to form as more churches followed suit. They had to not only overcome vaccine hesitancy but also many residents had food insecurity, so they turned the vaccine clinics into food drives as well.
When the data showed that the highest percentage of unvaccinated people were in the the 64th District of Watts, Assemblymember Mike Gipson activated his resources and teamed with Dr. Jerry Abraham of Kedren Health in South Los Angeles, creating a grass roots vaccination drive. Volunteers went door to door throughout the community, offering residents the opportunity to have their questions answered by Black and Brown doctors, prior to being offered the shot. Amazingly, in this day and age of misinformation, this simple strategy proved to be quite effective.
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