‘Young Men of Color’ Are Weak Point in Boosting COVID-19 Vaccination Rate: Kansas City Mayor

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas addresses demonstrators with a bullhorn during a protest at the Country Club Plaza on May 31, 2020 in Kansas City, Missouri. Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images

The mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, said he wants to boost the city’s COVID-19 vaccination rate by attempting to dissuade “young men of color” from being hesitant to get the shot.

Mayor Quinton Lucas, a Democrat, said that part of the city’s outreach will be giving away free items at rap and country music concerts in a bid to boost vaccinations.

“Young men of color is a place where we have incredible weakness right now. That’s why we’re not only being as creative as possible in how we reach out through traditional media, but also concerts,” Mayor Quinton Lucas, a Democrat, told CBS News on July 25. “We’ll be appearing and giving away tickets at hip hop concerts, country music concerts, any number of things that say to people that the vaccine is around, the vaccine is safe, and it’s important for you to take.”

After the interview, Lucas wrote on Twitter that “vaccines [are] coming to the Gucci Mane concert.”

Kansas City, he said, currently has a “painfully low” vaccination rate against COVID-19, the illness caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

According to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, about 38.8 percent of the population was fully vaccinated, which is lower than the nationwide vaccination rate. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that about 49 percent of the population is inoculated.

Lucas later added in the interview that the city might rethink its policies about vaccination mandates but said they’re not needed so far. A mask mandate, he said, also isn’t needed now.

“In terms of compulsion, we are giving more consideration to requiring all of our 5,000 city employees to be vaccinated,” he said. “I think that is something. I do encourage more American businesses, more American local and state governments to consider that as an important step for how we can show how important it is to our jurisdictions.”

His remarks come as nearby St. Louis County announced it would reimpose an indoor mask mandate for both unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals and “strongly encouraged” masking outdoors.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in 2022, soon after announced he would file a lawsuit against the countywide mask policy.

“The citizens of St. Louis and St. Louis County are not subjects—they are free people. As their Attorney General, I’ll be filing suit Monday to stop this insanity,” he wrote in a tweet on July 23.