Vaccine hesitancy or systemic racism?
Jun 23,2021 - Last updated at Jun 23,2021
By Tian Johnson, Stephaun E. Wallace and Maaza Seyoum
JOHANNESBURG/SEATTLE/ADDIS ABABA — When the United States began to roll out COVID-19 vaccines earlier this year, uptake in black communities lagged behind their white counterparts. Many assumed this was by choice: the history of medical abuses against them had supposedly left African-Americans mistrustful of the public-health intervention. A similar vaccine hesitancy has also purportedly hampered efforts to vaccinate African populations.
But this narrative amounts to little more than obfuscation.
To be sure, minority communities and developing-country populations may approach health services cautiously, and with good reason. From the gynecological experiments J. Marion Sims performed on enslaved black women in the 1800s to the four-decade-long Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which infected black men were observed but not treated, there is no shortage of instances of medical abuse against African-Americans.