Let’s thank taxes for our vaccines and the programs keeping California afloat during COVID

Paying our taxes this year is cause for celebration. Why? Taxes fund our public health departments — the hundreds of thousands of workers who have managed testing for COVID-19, who have led contact tracing to alert people when they may have been exposed to the virus and who have organized vaccination sites to ensure as many people as possible can receive a vaccine as quickly and as equitably as possible.

Taxes fund our medical and health research institutions, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute of Health (NIH), whose guidance we’ve been following from the first days of the pandemic.

Taxes pay the salaries of our public school teachers, who are adapting their lesson plans and educational strategies for virtual classrooms and all the challenges an online classroom brings.

Taxes help build broadband infrastructure, so that children can participate in distance-learning while schools are closed and so those of us working from home have high-speed, reliable internet to get on video calls and send emails.

Taxes fund affordable housing, social security, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, food stamps, unemployment benefits, child care assistance and other safety net programs that are always important and particularly needed during an economic recession and a period of mass unemployment.

Taxes pay for the pipes that bring clean water for us to wash our hands. Taxes fund transportation and road construction to get essential workers to their jobs. Taxes pay the city workers who mend the sidewalks, prune the trees and tend the parks so we can exercise while keeping our distance.

And tax dollars fund vaccine development, finally giving us the first glimpses of hope for better controlling the virus. The U.S. government, using taxpayer money, contributed $4 billion to vaccine development.

We are not out of the woods yet. Although hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. have been vaccinated, there are still massive racial inequities in vaccine distribution in the country. The CDC ranked California as one of the worst five states for inequitable vaccine distribution, with differential access by race, income and ability status, among other factors.

The racial inequities are stark. In California, only 21% of vaccine doses have gone to Latino residents, though they account for 40% of the population. Additionally, only 3% of vaccine doses have gone to Black residents, though they make up 6.5% of the population. These inequities are particularly troubling when we consider that Black and Latino people are disproportionately vulnerable to COVID-19, due to long-standing medical racism and residential segregation.

On a global scale, 30 countries have yet to vaccinate a single person, with a lack of access to vaccines being particularly apparent in low- and middle-income countries.

The public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a monumental showing of what we can do when we pool our resources. It’s a reminder that we need each other, that our fates are inextricably linked. We wear masks as a sign of community care.

As we pay our taxes this season, let them be a reminder of our interconnectedness. If we’ve learned from what we’ve done well and what we’ve failed to do in the last year, if we are willing to contribute our individual resources for the sake of collective humanity and for the sake of public health, we may be able to come out on the other side of this pandemic into a more just and more equitable world.

This story was originally published May 19, 2021 at 6:00 AM.