Did COVID-19 Vaccines Go to the Whitest Neighborhoods First? Racial Inequities in Six Million Phase 1 Doses Shipped to Pennsylvania

Abstract

Research on racial disparities in COVID-19 vaccination rates has focused primarily on vaccine hesitancy. However, vaccine hesitancy research is increasingly unable to account for racial disparities in vaccination rates in the U.S., which have shrunk rapidly over the past year. This and other evidence suggests that inequities in vaccine allocation and access may have contributed to vaccination rate disparities in the U.S. But to our knowledge, no previously published research has examined whether the geographic distribution of COVID-19 vaccines has led to greater access for White Americans than for Black Americans. Here, we link neighborhood-level data on vaccine allocation to data on racial demographics to show that in the first 17 weeks of Pennsylvania's COVID-19 vaccine rollout (Phase 1), White people were 25% more likely than Black people to live in neighborhoods (census tracts) that received vaccine shipments. In the 17 weeks of Pennsylvania's de jure restrictions on vaccine eligibility, de facto geographic restrictions on vaccine access disproportionately disadvantaged Black people and favored White people. In revealing these vaccine inequities, our work builds on prior work to develop a theory-driven, evidence-based, reproducible framework for studying racial inequities in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.