A racial divide plagues Charlotte’s vaccine effort. This pharmacist is trying to help.

East Charlotte resident Sylvia Graves breathed a sigh of relief last Thursday afternoon, after she deftly drove past the huge line-up of cars outside the Bojangles Coliseum mass COVID-19 vaccination site.

The 60-year-old delivery woman for Edible Arrangements had her own shot waiting for her less than two miles away — at Premier Pharmacy and Wellness Center, an independent operation staffed by and primarily serving people of color, on Monroe Road.

Traffic was the last obstacle for Graves on her immunization journey, capping off months of ever-cautious coronavirus protocols as her job propelled her into hundreds of businesses and customer homes.

Graves recently discussed the vaccine with her primary care physician, and she felt reassured to hear he’d already received the shots. She found comfort in listening to experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, and Mecklenburg County Public Health Director Gibbie Harris.

And Graves saw all the people who looked like her publicly endorsing the vaccine, including her pastor, Dr. Clifford A. Jones Sr. of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church — as well as Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles and former mayor Harvey Gantt.

“I was reluctant to get the vaccine, primarily because it’s new,” Graves said. “It was new on the horizon, and they said they kind of expedited the drug process ... I’m so proud of myself because initially I was against it.”

Graves said her 21-year-old daughter is willing to get the vaccine when eligibility expands. But most of Graves’ closest friends remain wary and fret over how exactly the vaccines are manufactured.

Dr. Martez Prince, founder of Premier Pharmacy, is well versed in these concerns — and the pervasive distrust of medicine among many Black adults, rooted in systemic racism and trauma still reverberating from events like the decades-long Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which participants were misled by researchers and not given access to penicillin.

Prince relishes the opportunity to educate and empower people to make medically-sound decisions. He’s seen how myths can “can spread like wildfire, and talk a whole community out of getting a vaccine.”

But Prince doesn’t force the vaccine on his patients, many of whom come to the pharmacy for wraparound services, which during the pandemic has included on-site COVID-19 testing. Prince said Premier Pharmacy’s personalized model has fostered patient relationships built on trust and candid conversations.

“The biggest thing is to just really show how vaccines in general work,” Prince told the Observer. “We have a lot of patients who stated, ‘I am hesitant about the vaccine, but I am going to get it based on all the information ... I’m only going to get it if I get it at (Premier) Pharmacy.’”

Racial disparities from the start

Despite a severely limited vaccine supply, Mecklenburg County Public Health has transferred hundreds of its allotted doses to Premier Pharmacy so far — in just one of multiple community partnerships designed to bolster vaccine access among marginalized groups. Thousands of eager people are still stuck on the pharmacy’s waitlist, though, Prince said.

The county, which last year was seemingly blindsided by the virus’ disproportionate impact on Black residents, now regularly touts its equity plan as Mecklenburg races to achieve herd immunity.

Health Director Harris, in her weekly COVID-19 updates to county commissioners, rattles off a steadily growing list of churches and community centers that hosted vaccine clinics for their members, quelling anxiety and confusion in the fragmented rollout. Some are run as pop-up or walk-in sites, but they’re not publicly advertised.

Those are in addition to the ambitious clinics run by the health department, Atrium Health and Novant Health to inoculate thousands of people within mere hours.

“We’re in a situation where we need the large-scale and the small-scale efforts to be successful,” said Melinda Forthofer, a public health professor at UNC Charlotte. “Yes, the small-scale efforts will take longer, but here are people who respond better to those more intimate, community-level activities.”

Harris has outwardly acknowledged racial disparities stubbornly persist — with progress steadily, albeit slowly, chipping away at a yawning vaccination gap first publicly observed in February.

At the time, the health department said 16% of its first dose recipients were Black and 69% were white, the Charlotte Observer reported. By contrast, Black residents comprise 32% of Mecklenburg’s population, and white residents account for 54%, according to census estimates.

When Prince, the pharmacist, looks at the now somewhat improving statistics, and the sheer number of shots in arms each week, he feels a sense of pride. He’s included in those numbers — so is his pharmacy staff, patient base and community members who heard about Premier Pharmacy in local news coverage.

“We are really helping people and changing their lives and getting them back to normal,” Prince said. “A lot of people are just really thankful they were able to find a vaccination place.”

‘Where are my people?’

During a meeting of the county commissioner’s Health and Human Services Committee last week, Harris said the local vaccine breakdown had increased to 22% for African Americans. “But if you look at our percent of African Americans in our overall population, only 9.5% of those individuals have been vaccinated,” she said.

Without pause, the health director then listed other demographic shortcomings in a starkly uneven distribution network, where people with internet access, access to a car, childcare resources and a flexible remote work schedule are poised to stand at the front of the vaccine line.

“The point is we are continuing to see disproportionality in our community, whether that’s in the number of cases, the number of deaths or the way the vaccine is getting out into our community,” Harris added. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do there.”

Commissioner Vilma Leake, who has fiercely pleaded with eligible Black adults and seniors to get their shots, says she witnessed the racial divide firsthand at Bojangles Coliseum.

As Leake, who is Black, waited for her first dose, and later returned for the second, “it was the same scenario.”

“Where are my people? Why aren’t my people here?” Leake asked herself and recounted to the Observer.

“People were in line, but these weren’t Black people — they were white people.”

She envisions vaccine clinics cropping up throughout neighborhoods along Beatties Ford Road, West Boulevard and Nations Ford Road, among others. Leake worries the lack of drugstores, similar to the food deserts already plaguing Mecklenburg’s crescent, could hamper COVID-19 vaccine shots for the most vulnerable and least mobile.

“As we look at the disparities in the African American community in particular, we have got to find a way to address, get ahead and make sure that we try to close this gap,” said Commissioner Mark Jerrell, who has praised Harris for her transparency on racial data.

“It doesn’t fall on Public Health. It falls on us as elected (officials) and everybody in this community to really address this notion of equity.”

Persuading family

Charlotte native Tremaine Tillman, 33, said he followed the science when the COVID-19 vaccine trial data was released. Before getting his first shot at Premier Pharmacy last week, Tillman found encouragement in his partner, a physician who’d been vaccinated in an early priority group.

”This is definitely the next step to a bit of normalcy, but I also don’t think that this is behind us,” Tillman told the Observer, his tone wavering between excitement and solemnity only hours after his first dose.

The virus, he said, has ravaged “low-income and impoverished people who are considered essential workers.” For his part, Tillman convinced his own reluctant family to get protected.

Just days before his appointment, Tillman said his mother and stepfather were “hemming and hawing,” citing the Tuskegee experiment as modern-day justification to wait or forgo vaccines. His grandmother, meanwhile, is “very anti-medicine, very anti- going to the doctor.”

So Tillman, who is Black, asked them to take a step back and compartmentalize: “You know this is a global pandemic. It would have to be some really, really clever stuff for our government to affect things on a worldwide scale.”

And his closing argument sealed the logic: Assuming the government had a malicious plan to harm Black and brown people, why even invest in a vaccine if the coronavirus itself continues to exact a lethal, unequal toll?

Forthofer, the UNC Charlotte public health professor, said it is not surprising to see conspiracy theories circulate around the vaccines. But the right messenger — a trusted relative or spiritual leader, for instance — can dispel misinformation.

Essential workers, many of whom are primarily people of color, deserve to be vaccinated alongside all Mecklenburg residents, Forthofer said. That means dismantling all barriers to access, such as strategically deploying the one shot Johnson & Johnson regimen to people who cannot afford to schedule two separate appointments.

”Essential workers have continued to pick up the trash, have continued to make the deliveries and continued to stock the grocery store shelves,” Forthofer said, describing them as unsung heroes. “They’re more likely to be people who have underlying health conditions that predispose them to severe illness if they were to get COVID.”

Graves, the delivery woman vaccinated last week at Premier Pharmacy, said she still plans to be careful when she ventures outside her home for work.

She usually carries extra latex gloves in her car, especially if she plans to pump gas. Whenever she goes to the supermarket, she makes sure the cart handle has been wiped down.

But no longer will Graves fear the social media videos of hospitalized coronavirus patients, hooked up to ventilators and gasping for breath.

“COVID-19 is real,” Graves said. “That overwhelmingly convinced me.”

Vaccine info in Mecklenburg County: Schedule online at starmed.care or call Public Health at 980-314-9400 (option 3 for English and option 8 for Spanish. Visit Mecknc.gov/covid-19 to join the county’s waitlist or to apply for home-based vaccination. For other providers, find your spot via the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services’ MySpot.NC.gov.

This story was originally published March 25, 2021 at 10:13 AM.