People of color should be prioritized in COVID vaccination rollout, Fauci says
People who live in under-served communities, which often include Black and brown people, should receive prioritization in the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday.
Speaking to The New England Journal of Medicine, the infectious disease expert and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden said that ensuring people in those communities have access to vaccine centers and pharmacies can be complicated.
“We don’t want in the beginning that most of the people who are getting (the vaccine) are otherwise, well, middle-class white people,” Fauci said in the interview. “You really want to get it to the people who are really the most vulnerable. You want to get it to everybody, but you don’t want to have a situation where people who really are in need of it, because of where they are, where they live, what their economic status is, that they don’t have access to the vaccine.”
So far, white people have been vaccinated at rates up to three times higher than Black people in the 16 states who have released vaccination data by racial demographics, Axios reported. This statistic comes despite months of reporting that Black and Latino Americans are dying from the disease at higher rates than white people, according to CNN.
But there remains a hesitancy among some people of color in getting the vaccine, based on a history of medical malpractice against their communities.
“The one thing I have learned, is the first thing you have to do is absolutely respect the hesitancy of the minority population. They keep coming back and saying the history of Tuskegee,” Fauci said. “Some people may say, ‘Oh my goodness, that was so long ago, forget about it.’ But no, they don’t, can’t and should not forget about it because it happened and it was shameful.”
The Tuskegee study began in1932, when 600 black men — 399 of whom had syphilis — participated in an experiment to track the disease’s progression. The men were promised free medical care, but they all only received placebos even after effective treatments became available in what turned into a 40-year study.
With their untreated syphilis, many of the men “died, went blind or insane,” History.com reported. An advisory panel conducted in the 1970s found the men had been misled and not given all the facts, calling the study “ethically unjustified”, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Fauci added how important it is to convince the Black community that safeguards have been put in place to ensure another Tuskegee situation will not occur again.
Fauci previously said people of color are more likely to be in contact with people infected with COVID-19 because of their “employment, socioeconomic status (and) availability of jobs,” according to The American Journal of Managed Care.
“And then when they do get infected, given the social determinants of health which make ... them have a higher incidence of diseases like hypertension, obesity, diabetes,” Fauci said of Black people, according to CNN. “They are at much greater risk of suffering the deleterious consequences, including death.”
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