Boston officials and community leaders are trying to solve the puzzle of raising COVID-19 vaccination rates in Mattapan, the Boston neighborhood with the lowest rates.
According to data from the City of Boston, roughly 45% of individuals in Mattapan have had at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine administered. That's compared to the South End, which has the highest rate in the city at around 81%.
Speaking at a public meeting organized by the Boston Public Health Commission on Wednesday to develop solutions, Guale Valdez, CEO of the Mattapan Community Health Center, said they're focusing on making their messaging accessible to everyone in the community.
"All the work that we're doing, especially for Mattapan, it's recognizing the languages that we need to do them in, which are English, Haitian Creole and Spanish," he said.
Valdez said they're working with a Haitian radio station to runs ads on Haitian radio and that they're collaborating with counterparts in East Boston to see what's been successful in that diverse neighborhood, which has a single dose vaccination rate of more than 70%.
Part of the equation is Mattapan's unique demographics, which includes a large percentage of Black residents and a sizable Haitian community.
While overall 45.5% of the neighborhood has had at least one shot, data and estimates from the city indicate that less than 40% of Black residents in the neighborhood are vaccinated.
Former State Senator Dianne Wilkerson, with the Black Boston COVID-19 Coalition, wants to address that discrepancy.
"We have to respect the fact that the messages that work for the overall population, that work for the Latino population, don't necessarily work for the Black residents and even further, the messages that may work for Black residents may not work for Haitian residents, folks that are from the islands," she said.
Wilkerson advocates for going block by block and knocking on doors to contact those who may not be reachable by other methods.
"These folks, we've gotta go and get them," she said. "They're not coming, they're not gonna come to the health centers, just like they stopped coming to the mass vax centers, now these are folks that are embedded in their community and we have to talk with them."
City Councilor Andrea Campbell said messaging in communities of color, particularly in Mattapan, needs to address some of the adverse reactions people have had to vaccines and fears around that.
"But I do think the messaging in some creative way, I have no idea how to do it, has to address those concerns," she said. "Otherwise, just sort of stressing the importance of this saving lives, I think, is not enough. So I want to lift that up because I hear it quite a bit, particularly in Mattapan in certain communities, including some of our immigrant communities."
