The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio announced that the New York’s Yankee Stadium, which is set to function as a vaccination facility after this week, will only be open to the residents of the area in order to grant smoother access to the underprivileged. 

The new inoculation facility will be restricted to people who reside outside the Bronx, which is one of the most financially deprived places in the area and also has a substantially high rate of infections. The vaccinations are planned to be administered with the help of an appointment system, with around 15,000 jabs kept aside for the first week. 

“It’s a home run for justice and equity,” de Blasio wrote on Twitter, using a baseball term.

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Figures released by the city on Sunday suggest that Black and Latino populations have been under-represented among the more than 500,000 New Yorkers already vaccinated.

The data made available by the authorities of the area clearly outlines instances of racial disparities in the vaccination programme. People who are of Hispanic origin represent almost 30% of the city’s population but have only received 15% of the total jabs. 

Similarly, people from the Black community, who make up a quarter of the city’s population, only represent 11% of the vaccinated residents. 

Whites received 48 percent of vaccines, according to the partial data. The city did not have ethnicity data for 40 percent of the recipients.

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On the contrary, the available data suggests that about 48% of the doses were administered to white people, however, about 40% of data related to the ethnicity of people was unavailable.   

Evident discrepancies can be seen in the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of minority groups in New York as Latino and Black people show a higher death rate than whites. 

Due to irregular supply and shortage of COVID-19 vaccines, the plan for the Yankee Stadium being used as a vaccination centre was delayed.