Toronto officials want province to track info on household income and race when administering COVID-19 vaccines

TORONTO -- Public health officials in Toronto want the province to begin collecting socio-demographic and ethnic data from those who receive the COVID-19 vaccine in order to ensure that it is being equally distributed among various communities.

The city’s board of health will vote on a motion next week that would ask the Ford government to begin collecting the data as part of its central vaccination tracking system.

In a report that will be considered by the board of health, staff say that they specifically want to see information about household income, official language, household size, postal code, racial identity, and occupation collected from those receiving vaccines.

The anonymized information would then be provided to Toronto Public Health and used to help shape its wider strategy to address vaccine hesitancy in certain communities.

“Promoting the benefits of vaccination cannot rely only on facts. Trust is an important component. Misinformation - especially on social media - contributes to hesitancy,” the report states. “Personal decisions may be based on decades of experiences that produce health disparities. For many racialized groups, vaccine hesitancy can be based on a long history of mistrust of government and health care institutions.”

The report notes that the province has already committed to tracking some “disaggregated data” on those receiving vaccines but makes the case that the information must be “comprehensive.”

The report also details the efforts that the city is already taking “to ensure no corner of Toronto is left out in the vaccine roll out.

That includes partnerships with more than 280 community ambassadors and 125 community agencies.

The city is also in the process of developing a Black Community COVID-19 response plan and has also reached out to a number of leaders in various cultural communities to “determine an appropriate engagement process.”

“The team is working with racialized communities to determine the best approach to meet each community’s unique needs and interests,” the staff report notes.