America Is Getting Unvaccinated People All Wrong

Last week, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that COVID-19 is “becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” President Joe Biden said much the same shortly after. They are technically correct. Even against the fast-spreading Delta variant, the vaccines remain highly effective, and people who haven’t received them are falling sick far more often than those who have. But their vulnerability to COVID-19 is the only thing that unvaccinated people universally share. They are disparate in almost every way that matters, including why they haven’t yet been vaccinated and what it might take to persuade them. “‘The unvaccinated’ are not a monolith of defectors,” Rhea Boyd, a pediatrician and public-health advocate in the San Francisco Bay Area, tweeted on Saturday.

Boyd has been talking to underserved communities about COVID-19 vaccines since November, before any were even formally authorized. Together with several partner organizations, she co-developed a national campaign called , in which Black and Latino health-care workers provide information (and dispel misinformation) about the vaccines. She has spoken virtually to dozens of community groups, including churches and schools, fielding their questions about the shots. I reached out to Boyd because I wanted