The White vaccination rate is not as bad as it had seemed and Hispanic communities are lagging more than previously thought.
Updated city and state population figures from the 2020 U.S. census released last month gave a clearer picture of the country’s racial and ethnic makeup. In every state, the White-only share of population was smaller than projected, and, as a result, a larger percentage of White people in many places have received shots than previously reported.
As of this month, around 30 states have vaccinated a majority of their White populations with at least one dose, according to new calculations by Bloomberg using the 2020 census data. Florida saw the biggest jump, with an increase of almost 14 percentage points among White people.
There was a similar phenomenon for the Black vaccination rate in 19 states and the District of Columbia. But in another 24 states, the rate inched down slightly.
Meanwhile, faster-than-expected growth in Asian and Hispanic populations across the country resulted in a drop in the vaccination rates for those groups in nearly every place we track. Eight states saw a more than 10 percentage point drop among Asian people with the new Census figures: New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Washington, Georgia, Ohio, Texas and Virginia. Four states saw a similarly big decrease in the Hispanic rate: Louisiana, Tennessee, Maryland and Maine.
The White vaccination rate is still the slowest to improve. Last month, around 40 states reached a greater share of their Black and Hispanic populations. That continues a steady trend of greater vaccine equity throughout the inoculation drive, as the graphic below shows.
Our tracker has data through early September from 46 states, D.C. and two cities that cover 95.9% of people and 94.0% of doses administered, with race or ethnicity information available for more than 160 million vaccine recipients.
Overall, states are still generally lagging in vaccinating Black and Hispanic people, though the gaps have closed significantly since vaccines became widely available to people over the age of 12.
The new population figures used in this update mean that most dots representing the White population shifted up, meaning states are more likely now to be vaccinating White people at a higher rate than their share of the population compared to earlier estimates, while most dots for Asian and Hispanic people moved down.
Some of the remaining disparities among Black and Hispanic communities in certain states are a result of who has approval to get vaccinated, but hesitancy—for a variety of reasons—is keeping people of all races and ethnicities from getting the shots.
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 64% of this 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. But with wide availability of shots and near-universal eligibility requirements now, reaching the unvaccinated has become more 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.
The state of Vermont scored best on data quality, and has some of the smallest racial gaps, too. On the other end of the spectrum is Hawaii, with closer to 80% of data coverage for race—the state doesn’t report ethnicity. Washington, D.C., Massachusetts and Alabama improved their data quality the most from last week.
While data quality has generally improved, reasons for continued variations 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.
Early indications of inequity should be 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.