Moving the Needle

On a cloudless February day, in the shade of a white tent set up in a small parking lot in San Francisco’s Mission District, Dina Gonzalez rolls up her left sleeve to receive her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. She had recently recovered from COVID; after weeks of fever and sleeping in the basement and praying not to spread the virus to her husband or her kids, which, thank God, she didn’t, this shot could not come soon enough. “I don’t want to go through that again, no, no, no,” she says in Spanish. The 57-year-old runs a home day care, and she needs to protect herself and the kids as she reopens the business.

On the street outside the tent, vendors sell chicharrones and fruit cups, as a line of people signing up for a vaccination waitlist stretches to the end of the block. Alejandro Valencia, a 58-year-old cook who lives nearby, hopes a vaccine will help him get rehired at the Palace Hotel when it finally reopens. Maira Soto, 42, was told by the owners of the pharmacy where she works to sign up, but the rumors about the vaccine she’s read online make her nervous. Jon Jacobo, who helps run the site, overhears Soto fretting as he walks by. “I felt nervous the first time, too,” Jacobo tells her. “You’re gonna feel fine.”

This vaccination site is run by Unidos en Salud (United in Health), a collaboration between UC San Francisco and the Latino Task Force, a network of deeply rooted community organizations that banded together at the start of the pandemic. Over the past year, residents of the Mission have become accustomed to the flyers plastering the neighborhood’s doors and restaurant windows, encouraging them to get tested, and now, vaccinated, at sites set up by Unidos en Salud. The operations feel different from the sites run by the city. Clients can drop in, and they don’t need to show ID. Most are low-income Latino residents of the Mission and other