EVANSVILLE — At least 88% of the Vanderburgh County residents who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 are white, according to data released last week by the state.
The new Indiana State Department of Health numbers show that, as of Saturday, 24,371 of the 27,569 county residents who have had the first dose of vaccine are white. It's not necessarily surprising in a county that is 85% white, according to U.S. Census Bureau population data.
But while the state's spreadsheets do point to racial disparity in local vaccinations, the degree of that disparity is a question mark.
By the numbers, 965 of the 27,569 county residents — 3.5%, to be exact — who have received the first vaccine dose have indicated they are Black. But other data is inexact.
The state does not require individuals receiving a vaccination to disclose demographic information. There are far more local residents, 1,666, who opted not to disclose their race. They are classified, "unknown." Another 306 are categorized, "other race." The remaining 261 are categorized as Asian.
"If you look at just Black/African-American, they look like they’re getting much fewer vaccinations, but if you consider that maybe the unknowns are disproportionally African-Americans as well, or Hispanics, then that might be deceptive a little bit," said Micah Pollak, an Indiana University Northwest economics professor who crunches statewide vaccination and coronavirus case data.
The state's data also breaks down vaccinations by ethnicity, gender and age. Vanderburgh County's ethnicity data shows just 217 of the 27,569 vaccinated residents identified as Hispanic or Latino. Eighty-nine percent were categorized as "not Hispanic or Latino," and 2,759 persons, or 10%, were identified as unknown.
"A lot of the vaccination data, we don’t know race, and we don’t know ethnicity," Pollak said. "And that’s a problem because if you’re going to say that African-Americans or Hispanics are underrepresented or overrepresented in the vaccinations, we don’t really know that because it depends who these unknowns are."
Pollak posited that Black residents "are generally more likely" to omit their race in vaccination paperwork for fear of being marginalized.
Adding Vanderburgh County's 965 declared Black vaccinated residents to the 1,666 who opted not to disclose their race would produce a number equivalent to 9.5% of the total vaccinated. And that would be just the percentage that Census data identifies as "Black or African American alone" in Vanderburgh County.
But it's not that neat and tidy, Pollak said.
"It's not very likely that all who did not disclose their race were Black," he said. "So there's definitely racial disparity, and the absolute, most optimistic, best-case scenario is that it 'might' not be huge."
Lake County, where Pollak lives and works, is 23% Black, according to Census data. But just 11% of Lake County residents who had received at least the first dose of vaccine at day's end Saturday self-identified as Black. Another 6.5% were classified as unknown.
"It's murky," Pollak said. "If (unknowns) fall into mostly Black and Hispanic, then it’s a problem, but it’s a smaller problem. If they fall in other categories more evenly, then it’s a much bigger problem. It’s definitely a problem."
Age is a big factor, but not the whole story
Age is unquestionably a factor, given Indiana's age-based vaccination formula. The state opened vaccine registration to all people 65 and older last week.
Census Bureau tables indicate 18.9% of Vanderburgh County's white population of 152,831 people is 65 and older. Black residents make up a much smaller pool of people at 17,588, of which a much smaller percentage — just 7.5% — is 65 or older.
It means there are nearly 29,000 white people in Vanderburgh County currently eligible for vaccination based on age alone, but just a shade more than 1,300 Black people.
But that's just based on age alone under Indiana's Phase 1B eligibility requirements. It does not account for other Black residents eligible during Phase 1A, such as front-line health care workers and first responders under the age of 65, who have been vaccinated.
The state's release of county-by-county data this week was a major breakthrough for researchers, journalists and anyone else who wants to know such things, Pollak said.
The data may be murky in places, but Pollak said it's a lot more than researchers in other states get.
"Indiana is the only state I'm aware of that's publishing county-level demographics data for vaccinations like this," he said. "Most states don't even publish age demographics statewide for vaccinations, let alone county-level."
Evansville NAACP will hold COVID-19 virtual town halls on Saturdays this month
A past fraught with the devaluation of Black lives, such as the Tuskegee Experiment conducted from 1932 to 1972, in which researchers watched Black men die from syphilis rather than treat them for it, still causes many Black people to cling to fears and social media rumors and conspiracies when it comes to COVID-19.
Like the one that charged that COVID-19 was being put on the nasal swabs used for testing. And the one that claimed that Melinda Gates said Black people must be vaccinated first for COVID-19.
While Gates said that Black people deserved priority to receive the vaccine, many Black people viewed it as her advocating experimentation. Not surprisingly, many responded with remarks like, “We are not crash test dummies,” and “we are not guinea pigs.”
So as vaccines make their way farther into the local population, the NAACP's Evansville branch stands strongly in favor of vaccination — even though it was developed within a medical system that many mistrust.
The local branch began a series of four virtual town halls on Saturday at 10 a.m. that it says will "address the COVID pandemic, its social and economic consequences, and the role of health inequities and how vaccines in particular may play a role in the coming months."
The forums will be streamed on Facebook Live at the Evansville Branch NAACP page each Saturday this month at 10 a.m.
The Rev. Gerald Arnold, the organization's president, is well aware of Tuskegee and of the local Black community's low vaccination numbers, although he hadn't heard about ISDH's new data documenting it. Arnold wants to "address if there is any racism, any inequity, in the health care profession, with regard to minorities."
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But he's clear: Black residents must wear masks — "over your nose and your mouth," he said — wash their hands and practice social distancing. They have to do those things. Arnold paused.
"And take the vaccine," he said, landing forcefully on the words. "Take the vaccine when available. There's over 26 million people who have taken the vaccine, and they're still living. There are rich people who have taken the vaccine, and they're living. If millionaires are taking the vaccine, you need to take it too."
The local NAACP aims to "dispel some of the fears and inform our people how to go forward," Arnold said.
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Tyree Higginson doesn't quite know what to believe about COVID-19 vaccination.
"There’s a lot of information going on out there right now. It’s hard to determine what’s true and what’s false," said Higginson, a 27-year-old Evansville resident.
Higginson, who is Black, said one friend told him you can acquire the virus after being vaccinated. There has been no documentation of that happening and the vaccine doesn't contain the virus.
He's pretty sure the vaccine can be helpful to elderly people and health care workers. But Higginson is a competitive bodybuilder who is taking online classes to become a personal trainer. He's young. He is not consumed by fear of COVID-19.
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Higginson knows one thing for sure: No one in his family or circle of friends has talked about COVID-19 vaccination in racial terms.
"They haven't talked to me about it as a racial issue at all, or anything like that," he said.
Higginson said he wears a mask and keeps his distance from people. He plans to get vaccinated when his turn comes.
"I think other people should too," he said.
'We're reckoning with that 400-year legacy now'
Dr. Thomas L. Stratton, the local NAACP's health chair, knows all about the history that may be making some Black residents wary of getting vaccinated against COVID-19.
It started long before Tuskegee, said Stratton, who is white.
"Medicine as an institution has not always respected the dignity and the worth and the value of individuals, particularly people who are not white men," he said. "Tuskegee is probably the thing most people are familiar with."
Stratton pointed out that the Tuskegee Experiment overlapped the horrors perpetrated against vulnerable populations in Europe by doctors in German dictator Adolph Hitler's regime. He pointed to the 20th Century phenomenon known as the "Mississippi Appendectomy" — involuntary sterilization to poor Black women deemed unfit to reproduce.
"If you go back even earlier, physicians were part of the slave trade, approving people trafficked, if they were physically fit, to be transported across the ocean in the holds of ships," he said. "There were buyers and sellers, and there were cases of physicians experimenting upon enslaved people for medical knowledge — not for the benefit of the enslaved people, but for the benefit of the white establishment."
Black distrust of the medical profession didn't materialize out of thin air, Stratton said. It was learned independently or handed down through generations.
"We're reckoning with that 400-year legacy now," he said.
IU Northwest's Pollak is glad researchers in Indiana at least now have county-by-county data to give the issues and any distrust some scale. It can only help understanding and spreading knowledge.
"You couldn't do the type of analysis you're doing at the county level even a few days ago," he said.