Before a vaccine for COVID-19 was even produced, Dr. Emily K. Brunson and Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana knew that there would be resistance to vaccinations and barriers to equitable distribution for people of color.
Brunson, an associate professor and associate chair of anthropology at Texas State University, studies vaccination decision-making, and Schoch-Spana focuses on community resilience to disasters as a medical anthropologist and senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Now, they serve as principal investigators for Communivax, a coalition of scholars in public health, anthropology and public policy, among other fields, working with community organizers on vaccine access for Black, Latinx and indigenous Americans. The effort is funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.
To Dr. Alexandre “Sasha” White, an assistant professor of sociology and the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins, the wide range of academic perspectives is key to Communivax’s mission.
“When we’re talking about the question of especially what an equitable rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines would mean from an accessibility standpoint, from a racial and ethnic equity standpoint, it really allows us to develop a more robust and complex and also holistic vision or comprehensive vision of what health equity means and what vaccine equity would look like in a COVID vaccination campaign,” he said.
Communivax is a three-pronged initiative, composed of a central working group, national stakeholders and six local teams, including groups at University of Alabama, San Diego State University, Idaho State University, Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland. Local teams meet with each other weekly. The central working group takes their local findings and works on translating them into national policy recommendations and community leaders help to implement them.
For Brunson, “on-the-ground ethnographic research” is what sets Communivax apart.
