Data show racial disparity in who gets COVID vaccine in Horry County
While the coronavirus vaccination rate across Horry County isn’t where doctors want it to be, some populations are getting vaccinated at higher rates than others.
Local and national health experts are again pushing for an increased vaccine uptake as a spike in COVID-19 hospitalizations swamps Horry County hospitals. Even as one of the top counties in the state for vaccinations, Horry County as a whole hasn’t reached 45% of its population fully vaccinated, a far cry from the desired 70 to 80% immunization rate widely accepted as a goal to reach herd immunity. President Joe Biden hoped to get 70% of American adults with at least one vaccination shot by July 4, but that didn’t happen until about a month later.
Vaccine rate varies by race
Disparities in vaccination rates reveal themselves by demographic, geographic location and age. In Horry County, the Black population severely lags behind other races with only around 30% of people vaccinated, according to data drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau and the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.
On the other hand, the white population of Horry County has a vaccination rate of around 50%. The county’s Asian, American Indian and Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander category has around 45% of its population vaccinated.
The Hispanic and Latino population in Horry County has a vaccination rate of around 41%, data shows.
Horry County follows a trend being seen across South Carolina and different areas around the country. In February, the white population in South Carolina was getting vaccinated at twice the rate of other groups, state health department data showed.
“Many of those areas are underserved medically,” DHEC director Edward Simmer said at the time. “That adds to the challenge of getting vaccine. But we are committed to finding those places and, ultimately, we need to take the vaccine to people not ask them to come to us. And until we can do that, we won’t be successful.”
COVID-19 has infected Black Horry County residents at a higher rate
The number of coronavirus cases since the beginning of the pandemic have also disproportionately affected people of color in Horry County, particularly the area’s Black population. Despite only around 13% of the county’s population being Black, more than 20% of the county’s cases have infected Black people, DHEC data shows. Meanwhile, more than 80% of the county’s population is white, but only around 47% of coronavirus cases were in the white population.
Vaccine uptake in different populations has long been a concern of health experts and officials in charge of the vaccine rollout. In order to increase trust in the vaccine’s effectiveness and safety, health experts have teamed up with community leaders and held vaccination clinics at locations like churches and community centers.
Part of the reason for the low vaccination rate in the Black community could stem from a distrust in health professionals and government due to decades of racist practices in medical care. A Duke University professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, Global Health, and Medicine broke down hesitancy among the Black community by three reasons: mistrust, social norms and understandable uncertainties.
“It’s not just mistrust of the medical system, it’s mistrust of institutions,” Bennett said in an April post on a Duke research blog. “There’s a lot of reasons for [Black people] to mistrust institutions.”
FDA approval and Delta surge spurs increase in vaccinations
But the vaccine uptake for the county’s population and the nation as a whole faces some promising signs as the pandemic progresses. Earlier this week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave its full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which until Monday was distributed under the agency’s emergency-use authorization, along with the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson brands of the vaccine.
Some people who have resisted getting the shot have said they want to wait until the vaccine is fully approved by the federal agency, or monitor any long-term side effects, though evidence of long-term severe side effects of the vaccine is lacking.
The most recent spike in hospitalizations, driven by the unvaccinated population and affecting a younger group of people, has also pushed some who were hesitant to get their shot. Tidelands Health, which has locations in Horry and Georgetown counties, reported needing more staff to handle the uptick in vaccine demand.
