Advancing Vaccination Equity in the United States
Key Insights from Health Equity Policy and Advocacy Implementors
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Key Findings
- There is a need for increased multisectoral collaboration in the vaccination equity ecosystem.
- Disaggregated data (for example, by age, race, ethnicity, and geography) are essential to understand vaccination uptake within subpopulations and the contributing factors for that uptake, including vaccine hesitancy.
- Historically marginalized communities often experience multiple intersecting barriers to vaccination services.
- Community-based organizations require additional human resources and sustainable long-term funding to offer comprehensive vaccination and supportive services.
We developed promising policy solutions, informed by our findings, that represent opportunities for leaders and organizations to advance vaccination equity. These recommendations include the following:
- Use iterative and adaptive techniques to co-create and scale locally informed promising practices that elevate community voices, promote long-term cross-sector partnership and investment, and build vaccine confidence and awareness.
- Collect and leverage disaggregated data, in part through immunization information systems (IIS), to inform relevant messaging.
- Consider using CDC’s Health in All Policies, a collaborative approach that integrates and articulates health considerations into policymaking across sectors to improve vaccination access and uptake; this includes when making decisions about other policy spaces such as transportation, education, and other areas that impact communities.
- Expand and sustain investments and equity-focused strategies that have been used to support COVID-19 vaccination to improve routine vaccination.
- Maximize the utility of state IIS to identify patients’ vaccination needs at the point of clinical care and identify gaps in vaccination rates at the population health level.
In this issue brief, we describe findings from a scan of the vaccination equity landscape conducted April to September 2021. This brief describes whether and how vaccine advocacy fits within the priorities of national, state, and community health equity policy and advocacy organizations and offers recommendations for future work to advance vaccination equity.
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