Winning Trust for a Vaccine Means Confronting Medical Racism

Winning Trust for a Vaccine Means Confronting Medical Racism The US has a long history of abusing minorities for pharmaceutical profit. Messaging for a Covid-19 inoculation will have to overcome that past. Maryn McKenna Wired

Whenever the United States gets access to a coronavirus vaccine—and that hoped-for date keeps shifting, from the White House’s boasts of achieving it before the election to Anthony Fauci’s estimate of maybe January—one early push will involve getting the shot to people most in danger of becoming seriously sick or dying from Covid-19.

That is looking more difficult all the time, and not only because of the calendar. Some people—and this includes state governors—are concerned that vaccine approval may be fast-tracked for political benefit. But others are suspicious of a vaccine because of well-documented mistreatment of members of minority groups in medical research.

Polls already show rising suspicion of the vaccine, even though, at this point, none of the candidates have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and no final data about safety or efficacy has been released. Several national polls taken since the summer show that up to two-thirds of people plan to wait at least several months after a formula becomes available, to see whether adverse reactions occur. One-quarter to one-third of poll respondents said they plan to never take the vaccine. As the US government scrambles to protect its residents from Covid-19, it is simultaneously having to confront and try to unwind decades of justified distrust.

“Our message can’t be that we are shaming people for not being interested, or making them feel bad for not protecting their health,” says Margot Savoy, a physician who chairs the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine. “People are saying no because they are genuinely afraid. And if you dismiss people’s fears without helping them to have a reason to trust you, we will lose them—and not just for this vaccine.”

Responding to that hesitancy, several groups have announced recently that they plan to make their own reviews of the vaccine data once it becomes available. The National Medical Association, a professional society for African-American and Black physicians, announced in September that it is creating a task force to scrutinize any vaccines that receive the FDA’s emergency-use authorization, a shortcut to a traditional new drug approval. A few days later, Governor Andrew Cuomo created a vaccine review commission for New York state. Then, in October, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that California would also independently review safety data before allowing any new vaccine to be given there. Oregon, Washington, and Nevada joined the California effort last week. ...