Glenn Webb took a break from his job picking up trash in the parking lot of a retail strip in Antioch and walked over to a group of public health volunteers offering COVID-19 vaccines out of a minivan.
The QuikStop parking lot in Antioch’s Sycamore neighborhood was bustling on this weekday in July. Shoppers dipped in and out of the
Webb, 58, wasn’t sure he’d get vaccinated, but volunteer nurses had finally persuaded him to sit down in a folding chair and roll up his sleeve. “It’s convenient,” he shrugged.
And that was the point. Antioch neighborhoods have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the Bay Area, communities that have also withstood disproportionately high rates of job loss, eviction and coronavirus infections.
As the delta variant fuels a new wave of infections, The Chronicle visited three ZIP codes with the lowest vaccination rates in the Bay Area to learn why fewer residents there are getting shots and what public health agencies and others are doing about it.
The communities were west Antioch in northeast Contra Costa County, San Francisco’s tiny Treasure Island and a southeastern section of East Oakland that includes flatlands and hills. Their rates for full vaccination are well below their respective counties and, according to state data, under California’s rate of 65% of those 12 and over.
Each place is unique, as are the reasons behind individual choices to delay getting a vaccine. Many unvaccinated residents shared a distrust in the government and medical establishment and a desire not to be rushed or forced into getting the vaccine. Some repeated misinformation about the vaccine that they saw on social media, read on the internet or heard from a friend or family member.
Others were simply unsure how or whether to make the vaccine a priority in their busy lives. A grocery store employee said she worked double shifts six days a week and hadn’t found the time to get a shot until a mobile vaccine van parked outside her workplace.
The Chronicle also witnessed public health employees and volunteers working creatively to get more shots in arms. The effort in Antioch, where a local city council member was on hand to help coax vaccine resisters, showed how far officials are willing to go.
The team had worked in that parking lot off and on throughout the summer, but before setting up there, public health workers sought permission from a man who held court there from his car. He wasn’t officially connected to the shopping center but appeared to have authority over what took place in the parking lot — legal or otherwise.
“We don’t want them to chase us out for not being part of the community,” said Ernesto De La Torre, who manages Contra Costa County’s vaccine ambassador program. “It’s a small tight-knit community. ... We’re just there to get people vaccinated and leave.”
Keith Gonzales thinks about the word “fear.” The 45-year-old Treasure Island resident doesn’t like using it to describe how he feels about the coronavirus vaccine, but it’s close.
“I’m real leery,” Gonzales says, smoking a cigarette outside his low-slung apartment on the San Francisco island, where just 45% of eligible residents are fully vaccinated, according to
state vaccination data. “It trips me out that they came up with the vaccine real quick.”
To the scientists who created the vaccines, he asks: “Did you have it on standby? Did you know this was coming?”
If he wants a job — and he does — he’ll need the vaccine. He knows that. But the conspiracy videos he watches stoke his concerns. Like the one with the woman who claims to be a vaccinated nurse, then removes her mask to reveal a disfigured face.
“She said she never had anything wrong before she got the vaccine,” Gonzales says.
Health Services ambassador Diana Aleman (right) offers vaccination information to shoppers at Cielo Market in Antioch. Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle
City health officials set up 11 vaccination sites on the island on March 27. By June 6, they were gone.
In San Francisco, 79% of those 12 and up are fully vaccinated. But it’s not enough. In San Francisco, new cases average 235 a week — up from 27 in early July.
The city’s Department of Public Health says it’s “laser-focused on ramping up vaccine opportunities in hard-hit neighborhoods.”
Treasure Islanders, however, must leave the island for a vaccine.
As of Aug. 3, just 1,258 of them were fully vaccinated. That’s 44%, says the state, which uses census data to conclude there are 2,859 eligible residents. But the island’s five housing providers say there are closer to 2,000 eligible residents, or about 63% vaccinated, said Robert Beck, director of the city’s Treasure Island Development Authority.
Either way, it’s not hard to find the unvaccinated. There are 740 or 1,439 of them, depending on whom you ask.
“I don’t want to be a guinea pig,” said Kurt Shuptrine, 55, who rents storage on the island but lacks a home.
Jin Sheng Wu, 62, walking his grandson in a stroller on Gateview Avenue recently, said he had no time to get vaccinated. His son-in-law, Ben Luo, said the family also worried about subjecting Wu to the vaccine’s potential flu-like symptoms.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls the COVID-19 vaccines
safe and effective and suggests people get them right away. COVID-19 has killed 4.4 million people around the world, including 628,000 people in the U.S.
Gonzales admitted that he doesn’t believe his conspiracy videos and said he trusts his doctor, who wants him vaccinated.
So why not get vaccinated, like, now?
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t feel like it.”
Mary Johnson leaves her East Oakland home in the mornings only to run errands. That’s because the nearby corner store is still empty before the after-work rush of customers.
For 56-year-old Johnson, the fewer people the better. She is not vaccinated against the coronavirus and isn’t planning to get the shot anytime soon, even though
studies show that vaccines are safe and effective against death and hospitalization from COVID-19.
“It’s really rushed,” Johnson said of the vaccine’s release. “I don’t need any side effects. I got enough going on with the body.”
Johnson lives in the 94605 ZIP code in Oakland — an area that has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the county with 62% fully inoculated compared with nearly 73% in all of Alameda County.
The 9-square-mile ZIP code is home to nearly 43,400 people. The neighborhoods are predominately Black and Latino. And about 14% of the population lives below the poverty line,
according to the census reporter.
Oakland overall has fully vaccinated 70.3% of its more than 425,000 residents 12 and over, and administered at least one dose to 84.6%.
Recently, Alameda County partnered with community organizations to go door to door in neighborhoods to hand out masks, offer information on rental and food assistance programs, and urge people to get the vaccine, said Andrew Nelsen of the Alameda County Public Health Department’s health and equity planning unit.
“The way to reach people is to be the people you’re trying to reach,” Nelsen said. “Being talked at by an expert is very different than (talking) with a peer or a friend.”
Nelsen said there are a number of reasons people haven’t gotten vaccinated. Some don’t know where to go, some can’t go because they work long hours, and some people didn’t know it was free.
On a recent afternoon, Michele Custodio, 49, stopped outside a tent at Osita Health Clinic in East Oakland to schedule her second dose of the vaccine, something she has delayed.
Custodio said she’s read online that vaccines have microchips and can change DNA.
These claims are false, but she and many other vaccine-hesitant people have found them compelling.
Also at Osita is 36-year-old Charlie Lloyd, who just received his first shot of Pfizer. Earlier in the day, he’d attended the funeral of a 40-year-old friend who’d died of COVID-19 a few weeks earlier. Lloyd said his friend’s death inspired him to get the shot.
“I couldn’t be happier right now,” Lloyd said after his shot. “I feel good about this.”
Outside an Antioch grocery store, cashier Cristina Diaz was waved down by county public health worker as soon as she stepped out the door, finally done with her shift on a Thursday in July.
“Have you been vaccinated?” the county staffer, Diana Aleman, said in Spanish.
Diaz, 30, nodded. But she immediately dialed her older sister and told her her to come to the store, Cielo Market on A Street — and try to persuade their reluctant father, too.
“They were just not doing it,” Diaz said.
This neighborhood of apartments and condos is tucked along Highway 4 in Antioch, a commuter city of about 110,000. Residents in this part of the city are young and impoverished: The median age is just over 26, and the per capita income is $16,000 — compared with $29,500 for all of Antioch and $48,000 for Contra Costa County.
They are also disproportionately unprotected by vaccines for COVID-19. About 18,000 people 12 and up are unvaccinated, representing about 33% of residents living in Antioch ZIP code 94509 — compared with nearly 24% of residents in all of Contra Costa County, according to state data. The data is more stark in the Sycamore neighborhood, where about 50% of those eligible for vaccines are at least partially vaccinated, compared with 69% of Antioch as a whole, the county said, and 76.4% for the county overall.
Generational mistrust of the government, misinformation and the crushing demands of work and poverty have conspired to leave these communities less protected by vaccinations, De La Torre said. Combating that, he realized, would take persistence and a light touch.
“Every person we get vaccinated is another person to bring that message back to their communities and share — ‘I got vaccinated, and I’m OK,’” he said.
After several hours at the market, the group piled into the van and drove less than a mile away to the QuikStop parking lot.
Nay Nay Daniels, 22, who was selling egg rolls and hibiscus drinks in the parking lot, pulled out her phone and showed a TikTok video purporting to depict first lady Jill Biden calling the vaccines an experiment. Daniels said she believed God would protect her and the government would not.
City Council Member Tamisha Torres-Walker joined the county volunteers to help provide a known and trusted voice to the mission in her district, a predominantly black and Latino area of Antioch. She acknowledged “it’s a big concern that not enough of our people are getting vaccinated.”
Torres-Walker, who is Black, said she understands vaccine hesitation given experiences of mistreatment and undertreatment of African Americans among some seeking care in medical settings. Torres-Walker, too, is hesitant to get vaccinated.
“Unfortunately it’s related to pre-existing historical trauma — people don’t trust the government,” Torres-Walker said.
De La Torre recalled a middle-aged man who drove past them several times before doubling back and calling out, “I’m scared.” They called back, saying he would be OK. He eventually agreed once he knew he could hold his dog on his lap while receiving a shot.
“We know we’re not going to change their mind right away,” De La Torre said. “If we maintain a presence, if we build trust, that could change.”
Julie Johnson, Nanette Asimov and Sarah Ravani are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: julie.johnson@sfchronicle.com, nasimov@sfchronicle.com, sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @juliejohnson, @NanetteAsimov, @SarRavani
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