Yaroslavsky on Frustrations Over Vaccine Rollout

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Los Angeles Initiative Director Zev Yaroslavsky spoke to the Daily Breeze about frustrations surrounding Los Angeles County’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout. While thousands of people were able to sign up to receive the vaccine, many were blocked, battling a severely limited supply, extraordinary demand for the available slots and a flurry of technical challenges. Yaroslavsky said much of the confusion stems from muddled messaging from federal, state and local authorities. “There’s been a total communication failure on the part of all levels of government,” he said. “To the average person … not savvy to the jurisdictional issues, they are just saying, ‘What are the rules?’ and ‘Hey, I’m 70 years old. Am I eligible or not eligible? The next day I hear something else from my local officials,’ ” Yaroslavsky said. “Everybody’s culpable on this, starting with the White House on down, and hopefully this is going to change in the days ahead with the new leadership.”

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Holloway on Slow Uptake of HIV Prevention Medication

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Associate Professor of Social Welfare Ian Holloway was featured in an Instinct Magazine piece about a multi-year study of PrEP familiarity and use among gay and bisexual men. PrEP, a preventative medicine for people at risk for HIV, can be highly effective when taken as prescribed. Holloway’s study found that while gay and bisexual men are more familiar with PrEP than in the past, many are still not using the medicine. “We are heartened to see an increase in PrEP familiarity in this relatively short period of time,” said Holloway, faculty director of the Gay Sexuality and Social Policy Initiative at UCLA Luskin. “But growth in favorable attitudes was modest, as was the increase in PrEP use among sexually active gay and bisexual men.” Looking forward, Holloway hopes to learn more about why PrEP use is still not very popular among at-risk men. The research was also featured in media outlets including Out and Edge.

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Leap on the Underpinnings of Increased Gun Violence

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Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Jorja Leap spoke to LAist about a recent increase in gun violence in South Los Angeles. Violent crime has spiked across the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, and gang intervention workers have identified contributing factors including the economic and social stresses of the pandemic, distrust between the community and law enforcement in the wake of police shootings, social media and drugs. “It is not a law enforcement problem, it is a public safety problem,” Leap said. In an analysis of LAPD’s Community Safety Partnership program, Leap highlighted the jurisdictional challenges of violence intervention, where different parts of the same streets are monitored by different police departments. “This is multifaceted. The old ways of doing things are not going to work, and it’s never going to be solved by simply putting cops [in hotspots],” she said. “If anything, sometimes that heightens the issues.”

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Storper on Quality of Life in State Capitals

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Michael Storper, distinguished professor of regional and international development in urban planning, was featured in a WalletHub article comparing affordability, access to education and overall quality of life in U.S. state capitals. Storper explained that the “tradition in America is to separate political capitals from major cultural or economic capitals.” As a result, many state capitals benefit from local economic stability but lack business, buzz and technological energy. However, Storper pointed out that Austin, Texas, is a notable exception as a capital with a major university hub, a gigantic tech hub, and a big music and creativity hub. Using 44 different indicators, WalletHub ranked all 50 cities and concluded that Austin ranked highest overall. Storper called Austin a “superstar metro in its own right.” However, he concluded that state capitals “don’t offer much that is particularly advantageous, except maybe relatively low land and cost of living compared to the principal cities.”

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Tilly on Barriers Facing Union Organizing in Tech

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Urban Planning Chair Chris Tilly spoke to KQED about the obstacles facing Silicon Valley workers who want to unionize. In recent years, tech employees have protested lack of diversity, mishandling of sexual harassment claims, and the second-class treatment of temporary workers and contractors. White-collar tech employees recently formed Alphabet Workers Union at the parent company of Google. According to Tilly, Silicon Valley companies such as Google have done a lot to make it difficult for workers to form unions. “There are a lot of barriers to building worker solidarity within Google,” he said. “Google and other tech companies have been effective at fissuring workers, hiring some as contractors, others as temps and also outsourcing labor around the globe,” Tilly explained. Workers are physically separated and have different employment statuses, including different wage and benefit packages, making it difficult to organize them around common goals.

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Essential Workers Don’t Want to Be Heroes, Diaz Says

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Sonja Diaz, executive director of the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, was featured in an NBC News article about the impact of COVID-19 on Latinos in Los Angeles. More than 1 million COVID-19 cases have been reported in Los Angeles County, with a disproportionate effect on Latinos. While they make up about half of the county’s population, Latinos are hospitalized three times more often than white people, the article said. Across California, Latinos make up 40% of the population but account for 55% of confirmed COVID-19 cases and 47% of deaths. Many essential workers must report to work despite the increased risk of exposure to the virus. Black and Latino neighborhoods with high density, lack of green space and few grocery stores are particularly vulnerable. “People go to work not to be heroes but because they need money to exist,” Diaz said. “They’re more likely to live in communities that are not resilient to overcoming or surviving a pandemic.”

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Ong Finds Digital Divide in Remote Learning Access

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Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the education news site The 74 about students with limited internet and technology access who are falling behind in remote classes. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also cited a UCLA report authored by Ong, which found that nearly one in three American households had limited computer or internet access this fall. Students of color, students with disabilities, students learning English and students from low-income households are more likely to fall on the “wrong side of the digital divide,” making it harder to access classes, engage with peers, and complete and upload assignments. “You can think about all of these things that by themselves may not seem absolutely fatal, but collectively it has this cumulative effect that eventually leaves certain students behind,” Ong explained. While the report does not focus on the effects of limited access, Ong noted that the implications are clear and concerning.

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Anheier on Future of German Leadership

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Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Helmut Anheier authored an article in Project Syndicate about the upcoming election year in Germany. The country is preparing for a “super election year,” which will include federal elections for the Bundestag, regional elections in six states and a vote for leadership of the Christian Democratic Union. “Because German voters tend to prefer a cautious leader with a steady hand, Merkel fit her country’s collective psyche like a bespoke glove,” Anheier said, highlighting the successes of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 15 years as party leader. Immigration, the economy, public administration and the COVID-19 pandemic will all be important issues in the upcoming elections. He noted that while Germany’s mainstream political parties have shied away from open debate of contentious issues, German voters will no longer be able to “sit back and place their trust in Merkel to navigate the shoals of the twenty-first century.”

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Diaz on Informing Latino Communities About Vaccine Safety

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Sonja Diaz, executive director of the Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, was featured in a Sacramento Bee article discussing many California Latinos’ hesitations about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. While vaccines approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have been shown to be safe and effective, a history of deceitful government practices involving communities of color has left many hesitant to receive the inoculations. “There’s been a storied legacy of the way that the U.S. government has rolled out medical and scientific experiments on non-white bodies,” Diaz said. Recent allegations of forced hysterectomies at an immigrant detention center in Georgia have contributed to the erosion of trust between communities of color and government institutions, she said. “More must be done to ensure these communities, who are overwhelmingly on the front lines of this pandemic, have accurate and culturally tailored information to trust that the vaccine is indeed something that will make their lives and their communities safer.”

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Peterson on Small Businesses Devastated by Pandemic

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Professor of Public Policy Mark Peterson was one of 16 experts who weighed in on the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in a National Interest article. Millions of Americans are suffering the economic consequences of the pandemic, and small businesses are among the hardest hit. “Small businesses would have been devastated just by the effects of the disease on consumers and their behavior,” regardless of the public health interventions put into place, Peterson said. “What has really been missing is the kind of large-scale and ongoing federal infusion funds to business owners that could have kept their businesses afloat and their employees more financially secure,” he said. “This is a societal crisis in which everyone is harmed by the demise of businesses, and the enormous fiscal capacities of the federal government, including borrowing, should have been marshaled in full force to amortize the burdens of the pandemic’s effects with its potentially multigenerational impacts.”

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