The Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout Favors White People

The digital divide is one reason why certain communities don’t have access to the vaccine

Amanda Spiller
An Injustice!
Published in
5 min readMay 9, 2021

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Photo by CDC on Unsplash

On a Monday afternoon in late February, my best friend’s phone lit up on the coffee table of our Airbnb. We’d escaped to the foothills outside of Yosemite for a girls' week.

In between work hours, glasses of freshly-squeezed orange juice, and Wim Hof breathing sessions, we discussed the trials and tribulations of 2020. The pandemic and the worldwide depression, anxiety, and grief it caused.

She picks up her phone.

Hi! There are available vaccines at http://myturn.ca.gov. Go and sign up using code P7XYGXSNT7, they have extra vaccines bc not enough eligible people signed up.

Image from Author

Within minutes, we’d signed up for appointments and forwarded the text to everyone we could think of. Our Wednesday trip to Yosemite would be repurposed into a roundtrip drive to the Oakland Coliseum.

A few of our friends signed up for appointments on the same day. They went into the Oakland Coliseum and walked out 40 minutes later, vaccinated.

“It looks like they are giving away extra vaccines in between eligibility groups,” a friend texted us back after receiving a shot. “Nothing sketchy.”

We flitted through our afternoon hike with cautious excitement. We could be in the same pods, we realized. Our houses could get together for dinner parties. We wouldn't have to worry anymore. The worst was over.

As the euphoria wore off, speculation crept in. It seemed too good to be true. We didn’t match the current tier of California’s vaccine roll-out. We weren’t teachers, or over 65, or disabled. We weren’t BIPOC or part of a high-priority population as defined by the State of California.

At 8 p.m. that same night, I came across the LA Times article that picked up on an access code leak in Southern California. Our friends began to reach back out with questions. “Are you sure these access codes are meant for us?” they asked.

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Grief and healing | Author of Laying Roots: Poems on Grief and Healing