Last week, Denver passed a significant threshold: 70% of its eligible population had been vaccinated, a nearly a month ahead of the goal set by President Joe Biden.

But that rate is buoyed by significant uptake among white residents: Nearly 80% of white Denverites have been vaccinated, said Tony Diaz, the vaccination branch director for the city’s Department of Public Health and Environment.

For Denver’s non-white residents, the rates look far different. Just 36% of the Latino community and 46% of African American residents have been vaccinated, Diaz said.

“When you see that and you compare that to non-white Hispanic residents … you start to understand the disparity,” he said Wednesday. 

Since the beginning of vaccine distribution months ago, officials in Colorado and across the country have talked up the need to improve vaccine confidence and trust in minority communities. Those groups have both been hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic and have historical reasons to question the medical field.

Though much of that lag has been attributed to hesitancy, community organizations and advocates have said the problems are exacerbated by poor access to vaccines. Language, transportation and sign-up barriers have helped depress uptake among certain populations, obstacles that Denver and state officials have said for months that they’re working to address.  

Now, Denver officials have been working for a few weeks on a new messaging and outreach campaign targeting Denver’s refugee and immigrant community, Diaz said. The effort will revolve around public communications: flyers, posters and text messaging, all of which will be tailored to specific minority groups with different languages and cultural backgrounds.

The overall goal is to reduce hesitancy, Diaz said. The new effort will augment the city’s current social media and messaging campaign that’s targeting the broader Latino and Black communities.

But the problem isn’t just informational; the question of access remains prominent.

“We call them vaccine deserts,” Diaz said. “When you look at southwest Denver, there aren’t that many pharmacies and urgent cares and health care providers. While (doses are) readily available, you can go into King Soopers or Safeway or Walgreens, there’s just not that many storefronts down in those neighborhoods. It’s safe to say that it’s an access issue.”

The access problem has been apparent since the beginning of vaccine distribution, said Yoal Kidane Ghebremeskel, a co-founder and executive director of Street Fraternity, a community organization focused on young people. 

“Transportation’s always an issue. Translation is always an issue,” Kidane Ghebremeskel said. ” … We very quickly saw that equitable vaccination was being talked about, but that vaccination sites were not provided” within the community that Street Fraternity served. 

The community, he said, needed more walk-up clinics, and Street Fraternity and organizations like it needed enough pre-notice to do outreach. His group has helped establish pop-up clinics and have distributed hundreds of doses, and the improved communication has given the organization time to educate the community that the clinics are coming. 

“I see it from the perspective that it’s much easier now,” Kidane Ghebremeskel said. “I think that speaks volumes to the collective effort that not only our services provide but all these groups and individuals working in the neighborhood consistently meeting. It takes that collective effort.” 

Gov. Jared Polis has said that most, if not all, of the people who were immediately interested in getting vaccinated have already received a dose. Ghebremeskel echoed that and said the effort now must turn to the hesitant but not completely opposed crowd. That’s why getting information out — in different languages and not confined to websites — is vital, Kidane Ghebremeskel said.

“We have to meet the folks that need to be vaccinated where they are,” he continued. “Making it easier to have these vaccines be available where folks are, so that in places of their employment, in places of their education, in places of their residence, or in the immediate location that they’re well-informed about and that they frequent.”

“It is education and just sharing the correction about the vaccine,” Diaz said. “We’ve heard that certain community groups – there’s a lot of myths and misconceptions and misinformation running rampant on Facebook. Let’s educate those groups and debunk some of this.”