Coral Gables Watch

The Herald interviewed a dozen elected officials from the greater Miami, Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville areas, where FEMA worked with the Florida Division of Emergency Management to establish vaccination sites in March.

All the officials told the Herald that the state did not make early, systematic efforts to advertise the sites. Often local leaders found out about the sites just a week before they opened, leaving them scrambling to develop outreach plans.

While both state and local leaders have blamed vaccine hesitancy in the Black community for low numbers, national polling shows that Black adults are now nearly as willing as whites and Hispanics to get vaccines. Instead,

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ tight restrictions on who could get vaccinated — eligibility criteria that favored age over other risk factors — and the state’s failure to coordinate with local officials to get the word out about the sites contributed to the failure, according to interviews with more than a dozen local elected leaders and public health experts.