Publication date: Aug 01, 2025

The COVID-19 pandemic uncovered important patterns of structural inequities and their impact on health outcomes for racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. Native Americans, Latinxs, and African Americans are more likely to contract COVID-19 and be hospitalized and die, but are less likely to be tested and vaccinated. Environmental and social vulnerabilities partially explain these disparate impacts while an underfunded and fragmented public health infrastructure accounts for the lag in the distribution of needed resources, including vaccines, at the national, tribal, state and local levels. To further understand the disparities of COVID-19 vaccine uptakes across diverse racial, ethnic and geographic populations, we draw from a socio-ecological model of community resilience and use a mixed-method community engagement approach that includes: digital community stories (N = 34), interviews with health providers (N = 14) and a multimodal quantitative survey (N = 1,194). Our results show that trust in one’s own community being resilient, community stories of cultural resilience and health provider use of resilience techniques increase vaccine uptake and supported self- and community care amid complex grief, traumatic events and personal and professional losses. Looking ahead, cultural, personal, and community resiliencies are key strategies for alleviating the stressors and losses experienced by racial and ethnic populations during pandemics.

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