Zuckerberg Hospital in SF was offering vaccinations to targeted zip codes ahead of schedule, and they were verifying residency.
At the county or state level, they looked at the data and identified that Black and Latino populations were not being vaccinated at the same rate as white populations, and also recognized that the pandemic has disproportionately affected those same populations.
So they committed resources to establish more clinics in areas with high concentrations of the given populations and may have waived certain documentation requirements that are historically more challenging for them to acquire.
The result being that people of means, predominantly white people, took time off of work and travelled long distances to take advantage of the situation. Taking the place of a non-zero number of residents that were the intended recipients.
-
I don't think there was a way for the public health authorities to create an explicit rule about neighborhood residency without inviting lawsuits. The best they could do is place vaccination centers in more convenient locations for underserved communities, and hope that it could raise the rate of vaccination in the vicinity.
I think there were people assuming that if it wasn't against the explicit rules to commute there to be vaccinated, it must be OK, even though it might (in the event of limited supply) undermine the effort to raise vaccination rates in that specific area.