Johnson: Black doctor shares vaccine experience, sees ‘slaughter of our people’ if avoided
Updated Jan 27, 2021;
Facebook Share
UAB’s Chief of Medicine was even initially skeptical of taking the COVID-19 vaccine.
Dr. Kiersten Kennedy is African American, the accomplished daughter in a military family that moved to Montgomery when she was five years old. Her trepidation was not rooted, however, in memories of the demonic Tuskegee Syphilis Study, or her knowledge of the historic healthcare disparities that are fueling skepticism about vaccine among some African Americans.
“I am just not a medicine taker,” she tells me with a bit of a laugh. “I know that sounds strange. If there’s a way for the body to do it naturally, then I really like that angle to any sort of treatment.”