(C) Pennsylvania Capital-Star
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Activists seek changes to Philly Health Department’s monkeypox messaging and vax rollout [1]
['Special To The Capital-Star', 'More From Author', '- August']
Date: 2022-08-17 14:10:20+00:00
By Michele Zipkin
PHILADELPHIA — Members of Black and Latinx Community Control of Health (BLCC) and ACT UP Philadelphia met last week with staffers from the Philadelphia Department of Public Health to talk about the messaging around monkeypox and the need for the vaccine for people of color and other marginalized communities.
“We drove home the need to change the public narrative focused on the LGBTQ community and the need to reach Latinx communities in both Spanish and English,” said José de Marco, ACT UP organizer and founder of BLCC.
De Marco opened the meeting by asking Health Department officials if they could provide a demographic breakdown of who in Philadelphia has received the monkeypox vaccine so far. “By the time we got off that call an hour later, they could not tell us,” de Marco said. “Maybe it’s too early.”
A spokesperson from the Philadelphia Health Department said in an email, “the demographic information for the vaccine distribution will be available on this webpage, via dashboard. We anticipate this will be available in the near future. Currently it is being updated with cases and vaccine capacity weekly on Mondays.”
Billy Penn recently reported on rumors that most of the initial doses of vaccine were given to white Philadelphia residents, despite high positivity rates among people of color.
“We asked [the Health Department] about the Billy Penn article that came out that’s basically saying that you’re seeing more white people get vaccinated than people of color,” said Jazmyn Henderson, organizer with BLCC and ACT UP. “They just totally dodged that.”
In terms of boosting federal advocacy and support, the health department spokesperson said the department “is engaging with community leaders to help support in advocating for more vaccine to be allocated to urban areas where we’re seeing greater spread.”
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