PAHOKEE, Fla. — The winds blew southwest the day of Pahokee’s Covid-19 vaccination drive, which meant the sugarcane fields were ablaze. Growers are banned from burning excess leaves when there’s an eastward breeze, to keep fumes away from the gated communities of Florida’s Gold Coast 40 miles away. Pahokee is in the same county but, with a median personal income of $13,674, its residents live in a different world.
A single highway connects the billionaire’s club of Mar-a-Lago to the working-class western edge of Palm Beach County, the vast shopping malls and mimosa-drenched restaurants giving way to acres of endless, flat fields. There are no buildings to break the horizon, only the desolate, empty beauty of farmlands reaching to meet the sky, with distant spirals of black smoke rising up to the gathering clouds.
Many of those here and in neighboring Belle Glade work in Big Sugar fields and factories: planting, harvesting, and packing sucrose to feed Florida’s $3 billion industry. Yet more than a third of the population lives in poverty. Around 60% of the inhabitants are Black, while Hispanic people make up a quarter of the population in Pahokee and almost a third in Belle Glade.
For the Feb. 13 vaccination event, a slow stream of cars arrived all morning and early afternoon at the Pahokee High School football stadium, down a quiet road flanked by dark fields and mostly empty school parking lots. There were never more than six vehicles in the observation area where people waited for 15 minutes after they’d had their vaccine. Typically, at least five of the cars were filled with white occupants.
They came from Stuart and West Palm Beach and Miami, even from Port Charlotte on the Gulf coast, many arriving in Pahokee for the first time. Plenty of locals were vaccinated too, but they were outnumbered by the out-of-towners....
At first, the same communities overlooked by the sugarcane-burning ordinance were forgotten entirely in vaccine distribution. Gov. Ron DeSantis handed responsibility for vaccine appointments in the county to Publix supermarkets in January, though the nearest store is more than 25 miles from Pahokee and Belle Glade. He denied the decision was tied to the chain’s recent $100,000 donation to the DeSantis campaign.
After grassroots organizers and local politicians pushed back, the state’s Division of Emergency Management agreed to set aside vaccines for local distribution, creating the first of several Pahokee vaccination events on Feb. 3. But they were planned on short notice, with few resources to help spread the word, and no way to reserve appointments for those who live here. ...
