At the beginning of North Carolina’s vaccine rollout, the rate of Latino people getting the shot lagged behind other groups. In March, just 2.5% of all vaccines administered were given to Hispanic residents, even though the group accounts for nearly 10% of the state’s population and was hit disproportionately hard by the virus.
But now, Latino residents are vaccinated at a higher rate than the non-Latino population, according to the most recent data from the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. Statewide, 67% of Hispanic residents 12 and older are vaccinated, a rate 10% higher than that of North Carolina’s non-Hispanic population.
At the COVID-19 Latino Task Force meeting on Oct. 25. Yazmin Garcia Rico, the director of Latinx and Hispanic policy and strategy at North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services, explained that of North Carolina’s 9.8%of Latino residents, 8.7% had been vaccinated — a significant feat, considering that a quarter of North Carolina’s Hispanic population is younger than 12, and therefore not eligible to be vaccinated just yet.
So, how’d we get here?
“A lot of collaboration,” Garcia Rico said with a tired laugh. “It’s hard to list them all and to mention everyone.”
Trusted ambassadors
The department used some familiar tactics to reach residents: bilingual ads on TV, radio and social media, virtual town halls, posting on Facebook Live. But it also did something more creative. A DHHS project, called Healthier Together, paid community health workers in each of North Carolina’s 100 counties to get the message out. Those boots-on-the-ground workers built on their existing relationships, in this case their relationships with Latino residents, to improve the group’s access both to information about the vaccine, and to the jab itself.
Garcia Rico, and others in the field, attribute much of the credit for the group’s high vaccination rate to these community health workers.
“We started the initiative to support organizations on the ground that were already doing a lot of work,” Garcia Rico said. By tapping into existing community networks and providing local people already in positions of trust with the money and logistical support to help residents learn about vaccines and schedule appointments, the agency was able to avoid wasting time and duplicating resources — in sum, to get more shots into more arms quicker.
Also, almost half of the community health workers are bilingual, which Garcia Rico says is critical.
“A regular interpreter is just going to interpret from a provider to a patient, but community health workers have more knowledge,” she said. They can provide apprehensive residents — who perhaps already know and trust them — with more information both before and after the shot, and connect them to other services.
Getting paid
Norma Martí is the co-leader for the Latinx Hispanic Community Response Team, a project of the North Carolina Community Engagement Alliancefunded through the National Institute of Health. One of the group’s end goals is to improve vaccine equity in the state. Martí has worked closely with DHHS throughout the pandemic to distribute supplies and information to the state’s Latino community.
“Getting the messaging out was probably the hardest thing because with social media, people get all this crappy misinformation,” Martí said. Part of the challenge, also, is that much of North Carolina’s Latino community lives in rural areas. Hispanic residents make up between 16%and 23% of the population in Duplin, Sampson, Lee, Greene and Montgomery counties.
“The first thing (Health and Human Services Secretary Mandy Cohen) had us do — I mean, I was there a week — and she’s like, ‘We’ve gotta identify people to help us get the word out,’” Martí said.
In June 2020, DHHS announced it would award $100,000 each to five different organizations that worked closely with Latino residents in different parts of the state. That project, in many ways, laid the groundwork for the partnership with community health workers.
“It’s not like (the organizations) weren’t already doing outreach,” Martí said, but she believes that paying these organizations, and the community health workers, for their labor and resources helped “invigorate” the work.
“They were paid. They were not volunteers. They were paid — which is probably the first time any of us have ever had a community health worker program that was paid actual money,” she said.
The NIH approved funding for Martí’s group, the North Carolina Community Engagement Alliance, in the winter of 2021. She and the other leaders looked across the state, aiming to ensure each region was represented and brought 10 Latino North Carolinians together. They began strategizing on how best to reach people in different parts of the state.
“Their position was, ‘We need to talk about the myths. We need to do some myth-busters,’” Martí said. “Everything that I’ve ever done in public health, you don’t mention the crap that’s being said, because then you’re just reinforcing it. And the community team said, ‘No. We’ve got to face it straight on. People are hearing this, and you’ve got to tell them, ‘No, this isn’t right.’’”
Martí and the other leaders said okay, and they all went to work. Over the last year, the group has created animated myth-busting videos in English, Spanish and Zapoteco, an indigenous language spoken in Mexico. They seem to have been effective, and the group is working on creating a Mayan language version.
Let everybody talk
Martí believes that general barriers to care can help explain why there was a lag in vaccine uptake at the beginning by Latino residents.
“We don’t have access, as a people, to health systems,” she said. “Latinos are the least insured in the state.” According to the Census Bureau, about 31% of Latino residents in North Carolina do not have health insurance.
“When we heard about vaccines, we’re like, ‘Well, it’s not for us because we don’t have no health insurance and we ain’t got no money.’ Because every time you go to a hospital, you’re stuck with $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 bill,” Martí said.
“It took a lot of time for those community health workers to get into those communities to get the word out to, to win the confidence again.”
Martí and Garcia Rico both said there’s no silver-bullet reason for why the vaccination rate of Hispanic residents looks as good as it does now. It’s the result of lots of work and lots of investment that has built up over the months.
“I do think, really, truly in my heart, it was that combination of collaboration,” Martí said. “We were all at the table, letting everybody talk to each other.”
This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
North Carolina Health News is an independent, nonpartisan, not-for-profit, statewide news organization dedicated to covering all things health care in North Carolina. Visit NCHN at northcarolinahealthnews.org.