Covid-19 Vaccine is Here, But Will Blacks Take It?

By Cash Michaels –

The vaccine to fight the deadly coronavirus is here, but will African Americans line up to take it?

If history is any teacher, not immediately. Indeed, many will share the online views of Irene F. from Brooklyn, NY: “No. I will wait it out, just like I did the flu vaccine,” the retired office coordinator wrote on Facebook. “I waited for years to see how it would affect others. I got my first flu vaccine in 2018.”

As I write this, there are more than 15 million cases of Coronavirus in the United States, with almost 300,000 deaths. Hospitals across the nation are running out of ICU beds, and new statewide restrictions are being enforced to limit the spread.

Given that African Americans statistically account for almost one-third the Covid-19 cases in North Carolina and across the country, one would naturally think that Black citizens would be among the first in line to receive a lifesaving dose. But as history has shown, African Americans are all too familiar with being lied to by government health agencies, and the legacy of that lying is not easily forgotten.

In a recent NY Times opinion column titled, “How Black People Learned Not to Trust,” Charles M. Blow chronicled the many racist abuses the American medical profession has committed against African American populations. He highlighted such devastating practices as:

• in mid-1800s Alabama, James Marion Sims built a reputation by performing surgical experimental procedures on African enslaved females without the use of anesthesia;
• during and after the Civil War, former slaves were frequently allowed to die of infections because white doctors and white-led governments refused to treat them;
• mostly young African American females in North Carolina and elsewhere suffered through forced sterilizations under the banner of combating mental deficiencies;
• beginning in 1932, the federal Public Health Service (now known as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) pursued the infamous Tuskegee “Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” leading to physical and mental debilitation, and for many untimely death, for unknowing participants. (That hateful episode is often erroneously described in the African American community: rather than being injected with syphilis, hundreds of Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama were simply observed for the effects of the sexually transmitted disease over a period of 40 years, while being told that they were being treated for it.)

According to the most recent Pew Research Center survey, “African Americans continue to stand out as less inclined to get vaccinated than other racial and ethnic groups.”

The study shows that 60% of all Americans say they will take the vaccine when available, but 21% said they do not intend to and are “pretty certain” more information will not change their minds. Among African Americans, only 42% would do so. That compares with a willingness to be vaccinated of 63% of Hispanic and 61% of White adults, though 71% of Black Americans said they knew someone suffering from Covid-19 in the hospital.