How Imperial County went from lowest to highest vaccination rates in the State’s lessons learned? Lasting impacts?

Vidya Sethuraman
India Post News Service

Throughout much of 2021 and all of 2022, Imperial County has held the best vaccination rates of all counties in California, even as it also accounts for the highest share of COVID fatalities per population. The county’s vaccination rates have bested those of wealthier regions, includingMarin County, Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco. Imperial County residents, by contrast, are low income and largely Latino. Imperial County also ranks second, after Marin County, in vaccinating kids with 71 percent of children completing the primary series. Most counties in the rest of the state have vaccination rates below 40% of children ages 5-11. EMS Briefing on July 13 discussed; What lessons can be learned from Imperial County’s success and can it sustain its momentum?

Imperial County, a rural region in Southern California along the Mexico border, has one of the best vaccination rates against Covid-19 in the nation, despite being one of the state’s poorest regions.   The current overall vaccination rate for adults is 91.7%, and the vaccination rate for adolescents is 73.2%, which are much higher than the average in California and the country.  Imperial County has seen 60,000 Covid infections in a mostly agricultural population of 197,000 people and 1,000 deaths.

 “Before the pandemic, we had endemics, persistent endemics. So a pandemic only means the entire world is experiencing a crisis such as we did with this virus. But we are experiencing that all the time. We’re experts,” said Luis Olmedo, Executive Director of Comite Civico del Valle.  When vaccine rollouts began in 2021, the state created a tiered process, prioritizing the most-vulnerable populations. “We created our own database that was better than myturn.ca.gov because we were actually able to make sure that we vetted people that were going in, that they actually represented that population that was next.

You’re not only the highest in the state, you’re actually one of the highest in the country,” said Dr. Timothy Brewer, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Imperial County has a very low number of White conservatives but the highest proportion of Latinos of any county in the state – over 86 percent.  Latinos initially lagged far behind on vaccines, but by the fall of 2021, their vaccination rates had jumped.

The county public health department worked with CBOs, Federally Qualified Health clinics, local pharmacies, farm labor groups and growers’ associations to develop strategies to get residents vaccinated as soon as possible. “We worked wherever we could to set up shop to make the vaccine accessible within the community and not just in one location, ” Rosyo Ramirez, Community Health Division Deputy Director for the Imperial County Public Health Department.