Denver officials have asked the state to give increased vaccine priority to people experiencing homeless, a move that if approved would conform to earlier plans and would bolster the city’s efforts to reach vulnerable populations.

Bob McDonald, the executive director of the city’s Department of Public Health and Environment, announced the request during a Thursday morning news conference.

He said the city was also preparing vaccine outreach teams to go to shelters and to those living on the street to ensure they’re vaccinated.

The move comes a month after the state revised its own vaccine priority list and gave no priority to those experiencing homelessness, after a draft plan gave them added emphasis.

While outbreaks in shelters have not been the largest in the state, they have bene steady.

The size and makeup of shelters make it difficult to quarantine, an issue compounded by the cold weather. 

“With our focus on equity, we want to get people where they are, we want to go where they feel most comfortable, where barriers are the lowest,” Denver Mayor Michael Hancock said.

“We need to go where the people are,” McDonald added.

City officials have been talking up their focus on ensuring the vaccine is distributed in underserved communities, particularly those of color, which have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic and often have increased distrust of the medicine. 

Hancock has held one town hall with providers and historians of color, and a separate, similar town hall was held earlier this month.

Those experts have said that building trust within those communities is imperative that can be achieved through working with institutions and known faces from those areas.

They’ve stressed the distrust runs deep, back to the Tuskegee experiment that left a number of Black men to suffer and die from syphilis without treatment. 

Hancock described the reactivation of Denver’s Emergency Operations Center, which was announced Thursday, as an effort to drill into vaccinating those communities.

The EOC will broadly coordinate the vaccine distribution effort here, officials said Thursday, and ensure equity across the city.

“By activating the EOC, along with the joint information center, this will allow us to leverage the full resources of all city resources and ensure efficiency and collaboration in our efforts,” said Matt Mueller, the executive director of the city’s Office of Emergency Management.

As part of the city’s emphasis on equity, Hancock previously announced he had signed on to a letter to the Biden administration, asking that vaccine allocations be sent directly to cities instead of routed through state governments. 

Hancock said he was still in regular contact with the White House, that he was “working” with them and providing feedback.