☀️Showers and patchy fog, with a high of 65. Sunset is at 5:51 p.m. It’s day 22 of the federal government shutdown.
All this week, we’ll be looking at vaccination rates across Massachusetts as part of our Connecting the Commonwealth series, Unraveling Immunity. And we want to hear from you: what conversations have you had about vaccines in your family or community? Send a note to daily@wgbh.org,and we might include your thoughts in a future newsletter.
Four Things to Know
- The Women’s Professional Baseball League announced Tuesday that its inaugural season will feature teams from four major cities: New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. “Each of these cities are storied sports cities,” said Justine Siegal, the league’s co-founder as well as the first woman to coach for an MLB team with the Oakland Athletics in 2015, “and we can’t wait to connect with the fans who live there and baseball fans across the country.”
- Massachusetts’ public defense agency has launched a new incentive program — effective immediately — for private lawyers in Massachusetts to address the growing backlog of unrepresented clients in Middlesex and Suffolk counties. The Committee for Public Counsel Services announced the new program in an email, stating that it’s intended to stabilize the public defense system in courts affected by a recent order. That order requires defendants without representation to be released after seven days.
- In a new report, the Fall River fire chief has called for assisted living facilities — like the one in his city where 10 residents died in a July fire — to be held to the same strict fire codes as nursing homes. Following fatal nursing home fires in Hartford, Connecticut and Nashville, Tennessee, in 2003, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mandated stricter safety standards, including sprinkler requirements, for facilities nationwide. “Anywhere where there’s a vulnerable population ... we can’t keep waiting for tragedies to happen in these locations to take a good look at what needs to change,” Fall River Fire Chief Jeffrey Bacon told GBH News.
- Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell is running for reelection in 2026, saying she wants to continue both her fights against the Trump administration in court and her consumer protection work back home. “Massachusetts deserves an attorney general who leads with empathy, compassion, and a sense of urgency and a deep belief that this job is about more than enforcing the law,” Campbell said Tuesday morning. “It is about making life better for people who far too often feel left out and left behind.”
Immigrants face unique hurdles to getting vaccinated
What are some common hurdles people face when trying to get vaccinated? Immigrants, especially those without legal immigration status, often face additional barriers. These can include trying to figure out which vaccines they received in their home countries, navigating the U.S. health care system and overcoming language barriers.
The New Bedford Community Health Center serves about 25,000 people a year, some of whom were born in the U.S. and some of whom weren’t, Cheryl Bartlett, president and CEO of New Bedford Community Health Center, told Gilda Geist, a reporter for Connecting the Commonwealth and CAI on the Cape. Bartlett is also a registered nurse. Workers at the health center have noticed a drop in immigrants bringing their kids in for appointments, she said.
“In the adult population, there hasn’t been a significant drop in people coming in for appointments — but we have seen that in the pediatric population,” Bartlett said. “Some of it is related to family members that have been detained, and therefore, there isn’t a parent to bring the child in or a guardian that can allow for the care to be approved.”
She added that Health center workers can try to offer reassurance where they can.
“We have had to really reach out to our patients and try to ensure that they can come there and feel safe while they’re inside our facility,” Bartlett said. “What we can’t provide for them is a guarantee of any protection outside of the health center.”
The federal Department of Health and Human Services put out a directive in July saying that undocumented immigrants could no longer get health care through taxpayer-funded programs, which include many community health care centers. Massachusetts is one of the states challenging that directive in court, and a judge has put the policy on hold for now as the case proceeds.
“All of a sudden, now we have these new directives that are suggesting that community health centers are no longer a place people can come regardless of their status, or their ability to pay,” Bartlett said. “So if this new directive were to be put into effect, then in essence all the undocumented patients we currently serve would have to be refused services. And now we’re being told that if this rule goes into place, we would have to verify if someone is a citizen, and then there are different qualifications of who would be refused care.”
Bartlett said the idea of refusing someone care because of their immigration status — or for any other reason — “is just sort of against my whole career.”
“We’ve spent decades and decades as a country trying to figure out ways to more cost-effectively provide care for people, and that was the evolution of the community health center. And now we are starting to tear apart that foundation,” Bartlett said.
Hear their full conversation here.
Dig deeper:
-3 Northeast states banned religious exemptions for vaccines. What about Massachusetts?
