Houston Health Department officials said the outreach will be designed to help encourage parents to give consent for their children to take part in campus-based testing as well as for their children to be vaccinated. The outreach will target specific ZIP codes with low vaccination rates, said Porfirio Villarreal, public information officer with the Houston Health Department.
"We have about 40 different ZIP codes where people are vulnerable because they may have an array of barriers," he said. "For example, there may be no medical providers in that ZIP code. They may have transportation barriers. They may have low income. They may be linguistically isolated."
However a number of council members questioned elements of the contract and its cost at the Jan. 12 meeting, and six council members ultimately voted against the contract.
The contract with Lopez Negrete Communications outlines seven key services: identify hyperlocal priority zones; conduct qualitative and quantitative research; develop insights and messages; strategy development; creative solution development and production; cross-channel implementation; and measurement and optimization. It was approved with the support of 11 council members.
The same company was hired by the city in 2019 to try to boost census turnout, a job which District G Council Member Greg Travis said was done poorly. Bringing Lopez Negrete back for vaccine outreach would be "flushing money down the toilet," Travis said.
"There’s better places to put this money," Travis said at the Jan. 12 meeting.
Travis questioned why the council was being asked to approve a contract without more information on their plan to actually get more people vaccinated.
Villarreal said specifics on what the vaccine outreach could look like will be determined using research that will be conducted as part of the contract, including focus groups and surveys that will help determine what barriers exist in each community. From there, a specific messaging and outreach strategy will be crafted for each community that would resonate with the people that live there based on the barriers they face.
Houston also brought Lopez Negrete on board in the summer of 2020 to help with outreach to the city's Hispanic population at a time when Hispanic people made up 50% of Houston's COVID-19 deaths, Villarreal said. This grew into the city's broader "Better. Together." campaign that encouraged people to get tested, use masks and social distance citywide.
"They did a very good job of turning a campaign [around] rapidly," Villarreal said.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said the contract had to be approved at the Jan. 12 meeting because it was being funded with grant money that came with a Jan. 15 deadline set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Turner also pushed back on criticism of Lopez Negrete's census work.
"I don’t want to put not getting as many people counted on just one contractor," he said. "That’s the responsibility of all of us."
Officials will be available to answer council member questions at a Jan. 20 meeting of the city's Quality of Life Committee, which oversees health care matters. Questions that are likely to come up at that meeting include one posed Jan. 12 by at-large Council Member Letitia Plummer: What will be done to better understand why people are not getting vaccinated?
"We need to do a better job educating, not letting people know COVID[-19] exists. Everyone knows COVID[-19] exists," Plummer said.
If the contractor's answers are not satisfactory to the council, the city could potentially refrain from spending the money.
"The action we take today will meet the CDC guidelines, and then we can pretty much control things from then on," Turner said Jan. 12. "Quite frankly, if I was sitting where you are, I would have some of the same concerns. I’m just trying to make sure we don’t lose the grant dollars we have because of the timeline that has been imposed by the CDC."
The company will contract with other existing community organizations on outreach and will also include elements designed to encourage unvaccinated adults to get the shot. The contract will run for six months and will end on July 31.
The council members to vote against the contract included Travis, Plummer, District A's Amy Peck, District F's Tiffany Thomas and at-large council members Mike Knox and Michael Kubosh.
