The Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines have become increasingly available to the general public based on age-group and relative risk status. However, important concerns and skepticism about the vaccine have been raised by Black Americans across the country.
These skepticisms include: would the vaccine be differently administered based on race? Would racist healthcare workers be receptive to our reports of discomfort, pain or other complications? Would faulty vaccines be tested on black people without permission? Would Black people disproportionately be given the far less effective Johnson and Johnson vaccine?
When making these concerns public, we have been labeled as “anti-vaccers”, “ill-informed” and “conspiracy theorists”; the list goes on and on. Why are white people, especially white liberals, calling black people names? Didn’t President Biden say that 2021 was the year for unity?
There are obviously larger structural issues behind the insensitivity of rude remarks, and lack of knowledge of history being the reason why black people are hesitant to trust the racist medical industry and profit-driven transnational pharmaceutical companies.
The medical field and healthcare system has a cruel and disgusting history of dehumanizing and sterilizing Black people. The long history of abuses has produced an ingrained distrust in yet another system that was designed to fail us.
The current-day medical industrial complex is quite literally built off of the stripping of bodily autonomy from enslaved Africans deemed suitable for medical demonstrations during chattel slavery. Slaves were bought by doctors for the sole purpose of experimentation.
In 1932, the Tuskegee experiments that lasted for 40 years made it so that black men were left intentionally untreated for syphilis by the government. A 2017 study found that the atrocity created such distrust that black men have a reduced life expectancy of more than one year. Tuskegee is just one instance of the decievement and withholding of treatment black people have faced.
These unimaginable and horrendous experiments continued with the stealing away of Henrietta Lacks’s cancer cells in the 1950s without her consent and knowledge because the medical industrial complex viewed Black women’s bodies as sites for experimentation.
It wasn’t until recently that studies claiming that black people feel less pain were explicitly disproved, and still many medical trainees believe it. This myth and other ways deeply rooted racism in the system has permeated itself, has allowed for black women to be up to four times more likely than white women to die of childbirth.
Recently, french doctors wanted a COVID intervention tested in Africa before anywhere else. Modern day society seeing Africa as a fit testing ground proves the immense racism that leaves many afraid. Generational trauma and distrust is reason for black people to have every right to question the vaccine without judgement.
This all weighs even heavier when keeping in mind that black people have been disproportionately affected by covid. Being more likely to die, it is obviously in our best interest, but it puts us in a position where we must either trust a health care system that has failed and was never built for us or continue to face a deadly virus.
Black people have reasons for concern and are scared for their life. Treating the mistrust as irrational and disrespectfully does not accomplish anything. Black people should not have to be afraid a doctor will not be able to notice pain or dangerous symptoms on darker skin. Health care should be something anyone can easily rely on, but unfortunately that is not a reality. A good first step is to understand why it is this way in the first place.