Vision y Compromiso, which has promotores, or patient liaisons, in Kern, Tulare and Riverside counties, used the funds to pay staffers’ salaries, said Maria Lemus, the group’s executive director. The UFW Foundation used some of its funds to set up a call center to coordinate appointments and registration. Some organizations that received state funding said they are using the monies for educational outreach and helping with registration language barriers. Most of those groups, however, don’t assist farmworkers. Through a public-private partnership, California announced in February it would give extra doses and $52.7 million to 337 community-based organizations as part of its COVID-19 Community-Based Outreach Campaign to reach vulnerable communities. Torres said to address those gaps, more resources are needed to partner community organizations with small mobile clinics. “Different areas of the state, like the Central Valley and the Imperial Valley, have lower vaccine numbers.” “We know that there are gaps,” said Diana Tellefson Torres, executive director of the UFW Foundation, which advocates for farmworkers. Now that the Salinas Valley’s harvest season for lettuce and broccoli is in full swing, and with other crops arriving in spring and summer, health departments and community groups are trying to vaccinate as many farmworkers as they can, targeting those who are hesitant or hard to reach because of language barriers or lack of access. Unfortunately, that’s time that we really didn’t have getting this really vulnerable workforce vaccinated,” said Heather Riden, program director for the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety at the University of California, Davis. “It’s taken some time to iron out all the wrinkles. About 49,000 have tested positive for COVID-19, according to a Purdue University vulnerability index. In the meantime, infections surged among California’s farmworkers, who are vulnerable because they work and live in close conditions. “While vaccine supplies were limited, vaccination efforts were focused on those with the highest risk of hospitalization and death to save lives.”Ī spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health agreed, saying, “As soon as we were given enough supply from the federal government to open up eligibility further, we went right for farmworkers.” “Nearly 70% of COVID-19 related fatalities in Monterey County were among those 65 years of age and older,” said Karen Smith, a spokesperson for Monterey County, in an email. Monterey County officials said vaccine supplies were so limited in January and February that they had to prioritize high-risk seniors ahead of farmworkers. “It’s all good,” Valadez wrote to Elsa Jimenez, Monterey’s director of health, in an email on March 22. “No need to update any further.” In a follow-up interview, Valadez called the state-provided doses “almost a moot point.” They were already running their vaccination site exclusively for farmworkers so they didn’t need them. When Monterey County finally reached out to say they had a batch of up to 1,500 vaccine doses for farmworkers, Valadez said no thanks. The decision by state and county officials to prioritize Californians 65 and older delayed vaccinations for thousands of farmworkers for several weeks as infections began spreading, prompting growers and doctors to step in to fill the void. The episode in Monterey County and similar concerns expressed by growers in Riverside County were revealed in emails obtained through Public Records Act requests filed by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation’s Documenting COVID-19 project in collaboration with CalMatters. “We had an opportunity to not only put them in line, but it’s only their line.” “We were ready to go out of the gates to just explode and begin serving a population that, I think, just wasn’t put in line, let alone in front of the line,” Valadez said. This program alone has now vaccinated 25,000, or 39%, of Monterey County’s farmworkers, according to their estimates. By March 6, they began operating a site that vaccinated 2,500 to 4,500 agricultural workers of all ages every Saturday. So Valadez and the clinic made a decision: They cut out both Monterey County and the state, applying directly to the federal government for vaccine shipments. “We were ready to go out of the gates to just explode and begin serving a population that, I think, just wasn’t put in line, let alone in front of the line.”
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