Hard for poor people to get vaccinated in New Jersey

One IPBiz reader asked why IPBiz keeps mentioning the absence of Covid vaccine appointments at CVS. There are several reasons.

1. In the New Jersey system of vaccine registration, one had to register at more than one hundred different sites. There is no central system that allows one to look for the closest vaccination site and book an appointment there. At an earlier time, the "official" New Jersey system only covered about 8% of the sites, and one still had to deal with the individual site (among the 8%) to get an appointment.

2. In theory, the CVS system, which in principle allowed vaccinations at many, geographically separated, sites, was a good bet. One could get a VAX appointment "close to home." Governor Murphy praised the CVS system.

3. In practice, getting an appointment at a nearby CVS store proved illusory.

There is another problem. Without the availability of vaccination sites near population centers, poorer people could not get vaccinated. For example, in Somerset County, the main VAX site was at Raritan Valley Community College, which is located a distance from the population centers of Somerset County. Moreover, to get a VAX, one had to ARRIVE in a car, AND GET VACCINATED in a car. That is a problem for people without access to a car.

Some of the issues are covered in a Newark Star-Ledger article on 20 April 2021. Note that people without ready access to the internet (independently of whether they were, or were not, internet savvy) were at a big disadvantage.