The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) allocated $350 billion to state and local governments to mitigate the impacts of the COVID-19 public health emergency by funding programs across a broad spectrum of categories. By the end of Q4 2022, some states (and their local governments) had used almost all the money available to them. Other states had neither spent nor obligated the vast majority of the money available for their use.
We wondered whether states where this SLFRF money was spent on programs to improve the vaccine uptake for residents would have higher rates of vaccination.
We compared both the amount of money spent on vaccine-related projects and the number of vaccine-related projects to the vaccination rate in each state, using publicly available vaccination data from the CDC. Data on SLFRF spending was compiled by Dave Kamper of the Economic Policy Institute.