Event Highlights: Expanding Vaccine Access in the Boston Immigrant Community
Over the last two years COVID-19 has revealed large disparities in health and wellbeing in our communities and grave injustice related to health services access, including vaccines. Many of these communities have a large Latinx population with immigrants from Brazil, Haiti and Central America. “Equity Now & Beyond” is a coalition led by immigrant community-based organizations who asked a team of Boston University researchers to study the following questions: what roles do immigrant community-based organizations in Boston play in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic? How is the coalition building ties among immigrant groups? How does the coalition build partnerships with healthcare organizations? What are the lessons learned for achieving health equity for immigrants in Greater Boston beyond the pandemic?
In this virtual panel discussion, moderated by Prof. Veronika Wirtz, Boston University School of Public Health and Latin American Studies Core Faculty, Prof. Lance Laird and Kamini Mallick from the Boston University School of Medicine provide an overview of the project. The immigrant community leaders participating include Rev. Dieufort Fleurissaint (Pastor Keke), Heloisa Galvão, Damaris Lopez, Clare Louise, and Kevin Whalen.
Among the questions addressed were:
1. What role do you like the Boston community to play when it comes to vaccine misinformation? How can we collectively be better prepared to prevent the spread and harm of misinformation?
2. What have been the most rewarding aspects of working with a community of immigrations on expanding access? What was most challenging?
3. How do you ensure that learnings from each immigrant community are consistently build into the program to expand vaccine access?
4. What are the key learnings from the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out that can be applied to other vaccine access programs?