African countries are still struggling for Covid-19 vaccines. One reason for this is the misconception that the continent wasn’t hard-hit by the pandemic. But the numbers tell a different story, write Tian Johnson, Tom Moultrie, Gregg Gonsalves, and Fatima Hassan.
Pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer have said low vaccine uptake in Africa is due to increasing hesitancy on the continent. But the truth is inequitable distribution of Covid vaccines have left Africa as a vaccine desert, write Tian Johnson, Tom Moultrie, Gregg Gonsalves and Fatima Hassan.
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 shortag
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The Sisonke Johnson & Johnson trial has denied that the implementation study has been expanded to cover the general public, in order to save vaccines from expiring.