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Massachusetts hospitals are filling
up again, like those across the country. Many of the patients are
blacks and Latinx Americans, the demographic groups
disproportionately slammed by the pandemic. The good news is that a
vaccine is just weeks away from distribution. The troubling question
is, will blacks and Latinx Americans show up?
“I
am not feeling this vaccine, and I’m certainly not feeling like
being in the guinea pig phase,” Rev. Emmett Price shared with me on
our podcast “All Rev’d Up.” Like many black ministers across
the country, Price is not confident in telling his congregation to be
the first in line for the vaccine.
Price’s
skepticism about the covid-19 vaccine is not a lone voice. His
reservations about the vaccine derived from a history of
hyper-experimentation on black bodies, intergenerational trauma as
its result, and the continued health disparities that resonate to
this day.
In
recognizing the high levels of hesitancy among blacks to get
vaccinated among her parishioners and the community at large, Rev.
Liz Walker, the senior pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church and a
former WBZ anchor, reached out to the country’s most trusted voice
on the issue, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci is the director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
On
November 26, Walker conducted a webinar titled, “Where do we go
from here? Coping in the next season of the COVID-19 pandemic,”
where Dr. Fauci spoke to the Roxbury community. The webinar was part
of The Cory Johnson Program for Post Traumatic Healing at Roxbury
Presbyterian Church.
Fauci
recognized our distrust in the medical system but assured the
audience that the speed of the vaccine does not compromise its safety
nor scientific integrity. However, with concern, Fauci mentioned the
lack of diversity in the clinical trials for the vaccine and wished
more minorities were in them, stating “what’s safe and effected
should not be only for whites.”
The
presidents of Xavier University, and Dillard University, HBCUs in
Louisiana, volunteered for covid-19 trials with the hopes of
recruiting their students as a way to bridge the chasm between the
black community and its distrust with the medical system.
In
addressing both students’ and their families’ fears and concerns
about the trials, the Bioethics Commission stepped in. It stated: “We
cannot allow our children to be an instrument of anyone inadvertently
or intentionally misdirecting and politicizing the research on
COVID-19 for their political interest.” Students at both schools
would have access to free COVID-19 tests and a donation worth $15
million from the lab equipment company Thermo Fisher.
However,
no amount of money can assuage or erase the collective trauma of
living with the history of medical experimentation done on our
bodies. It’s in our historical DNA.
Most
African Americans - young and old - cannot shake off the Tuskegee
Study, a clinical study conducted for four decades, between
1932-1972, to observe untreated syphilis on African American men
under the guise they were receiving free health care. The Tuskegee
Study’s deleterious effects on these men, their families, and their
offspring have resulted in a lifelong hell of mental and physical
health complications.
In
2010, Americans learned about Henrietta Lacks, a poor tobacco farmer
from Virginia, from The
New York Times
best-seller “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca
Skloot. Lacks was an African American woman whose cancer cells are
the HeLa cell line source, the first immortalized human cell line in
medical research. Lacks’ cells were essential in developing the
polio vaccine, the study of leukemia, the AIDS virus, and various
cancers. They went up in the first space missions to see what would
happen to cells in zero gravity. Her cells were taken without
consent, and to this day, the Lacks family is suing Johns Hopkins for
compensation.
1n
2018, a statue of J. Marion Sims, called the “father of
gynecology,” erected in 1890, was removed from New York’s Central
Park, finally. The statue stood across from the New York Academy of
Medicine. Sims perfected his revolutionary tools like the vaginal
speculum, a double-bladed surgical instrument used for examining the
vagina and cervix, and other gynecological surgeries on enslaved
black women without the use of anesthesia. “After perfecting the
techniques on black enslaved women without anesthesia in America,
Sims went on to offer the procedure in Europe to wealthy white women
who were sedated,” USA
TODAY reported.
Black
people are not largely anti-vaxxers, but the high levels of hesitancy
are understandable. To assist in shoring up confidence throughout the
country to get vaccinated, Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush,
and Bill Clinton have volunteered to get their’s on camera.
I
am asked constantly will I get the covid-19 vaccine. I demur,
conveying that I don’t know yet. My spouse is an ER physician and
will get vaccinated before me. She is my canary in a coal mine.
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