History shows why African-Americans may be reluctant to take COVID-19 vaccine

December 18, 2020

Julian Sadur,

47 ABC – Government and public health officials are urging everyone to take the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available to the public. However some in the African-American community have said they won’t be lining up to get it and the reason why may be rooted in history.

In 1932 doctors from the U.S. Health and Public Service recruited roughly 600 African-American men to be a part of a study that promised free medical care. However for many, that care never came.

“In this clinical trial patients who were African-American who had syphilis were told by the government and the medical community that they were being treated for syphilis, but after 40 years it turns out they weren’t,” said Dr. Yen Dang, the Director of Public Health for the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.

Over those 40 years researchers tracked men from the study who had syphilis without providing care. Studying as men died and suffered from other conditions.

Dr. Dang says that the medical community has tried to make reparations for what happened, but according to community activist Amber Green the mistrust still exists because of events like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.

In fact, Green says that mistrust has often lead members of the African-American community to go without things like regular checkups with doctors.

“There’s a reason for that and it’s not because we do not care about our lives, it’s because we aren’t sure if you care about our lives,” said Green, speaking about the government and health community.

Green says she feels until that mistrust is truly healed, some in the African-American community won’t be able to move forward with accepting that a vaccine is safe to take.

“Now instead of us focusing on how we can keep ourselves safe or how we can keep family members safe, we’re still talking about old things that we’ve been talking about since 1930, 1960’s, 70’s,” Green said.

But those in the medical community are hoping that at least the data from Pfizer’s clinical trials will help ease some of the fears. According to Dr. Yang, during Pfizer’s vaccine trials researchers found that the vaccine was just as safe for African-Americans as it is for anybody else.

“Regardless of age, gender, co-morbidities, so its’ 95 percent effective in the African-American community as well,” said Dr. Yang.

Going forward Dr. Yang and Green say the key to getting the African-American community to buy-in on the vaccine, will be getting both local and national African-American leaders to come out in support of the vaccine and take it themselves.