He has coworkers who have fallen ill, although not necessarily at work, but likely at home because they live in crowded housing. “I haven’t seen my parents in a year, they’re 80 and 82…that’s a year we don’t get back.” Because his parents were also recently immunized, “this opens up the opportunity for me to see them again soon,” he said.Ĭhavez said agricultural workers may be more inclined to get the vaccine because so many have either been infected or know someone who was. “At work they told us this wasn’t mandatory, it was voluntary,” he said. Although he works at a different, neighboring mushroom farm, its workers were invited to the vaccine clinic. Like Cruz, Mauricio Chavez of Hollister got his COVID-19 shot at Monterey Mushrooms. Their infection rates tend to run higher than the general population - 13% of farmworkers recruited for a study in the Salinas Valley tested positive for COVID-19 between July and November, compared to 5% of the general population, according to a UC Berkeley study published in December. That’s slightly more pro-vaccine than the 69% of all Americans who say they have been or will be vaccinated and the 30% who say they would not, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.Ībout 46,000 agricultural workers in California have been infected with COVID-19, according to estimates from Purdue University researchers. Twenty-two percent said they were neutral. In a nationwide United Farm Workers Foundation survey of 10,149 farmworkers - the vast majority in California - 73% said they would get the vaccine as soon as possible while only 5% said they would not. Tulare County has opened its large International Agri-Center, well-known in its farming community, where growers can send their employees for vaccinations.įarmworkers, like other essential employees, can also get vaccinated at other distribution sites, like pharmacies, but that often requires taking time off work, navigating a county or pharmacy website or the MyTurn online form and getting lucky finding an appointment. Some counties like Riverside have sent mobile clinics to agricultural worksites. Just having something on a website isn’t going to get farmworkers somewhere because there is limited digital literacy and that limitation has been a huge barrier,” she said. “We want to make sure the process is accessible. But success will take more available doses, and also more coordination and ingenuity to ensure that vaccines are where the workers are. United Farm Workers Foundation Executive Director Diana Tellefson Torres said targeting farmworkers at their work sites is the best way to make the vaccine easy for them to get. The clinics are sometimes only open to workers of certain companies, and they are reliant on how many doses a county sets aside for them. Gavin Newsom has visited farmworker vaccine events in the Central Valley, touting the state’s commitment to the workers who feed America and promising them more vaccines.īut workplace vaccination events are still few and far between in California, so farmworkers face many obstacles getting the vaccine, advocates say. “Some (growers) weren’t crazy about getting workers tested or bringing doctors to the fields, but vaccines are different.” “A big part is seeing how much growers really want it,” said Irene de Barraicua with Líderes Campesinas, a nonprofit network of women farm workers based in Oxnard. Large employers like Foster Farms, Pom Wonderful and Terranova Ranch reported about a 90% vaccination rate in recent, on-site worker vaccination clinics, according to the Fresno County public health department. Counties only recently started offering vaccinations to this hard-hit workforce, but agricultural workers are so far accepting the vaccine at high rates. The whole process took less than 30 minutes, including the 15 minutes she sat in observation after her shot.Ĭalifornia has more than half a million farmworkers - and they appear to be eager to be vaccinated. The process was easy enough: During a Sunday shift in late February, she walked from her workstation to an outdoor vaccine line. So when her employer, Monterey Mushrooms in Morgan Hill, offered its employees vaccines allotted by Santa Clara County, she drowned out anything negative she’d heard about the shots and signed up.
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