COVID-19 vaccine ‘will save Black lives,’ Black doctors urge Kansas Citians
When Nevada Lee, an internal medicine specialist in the Kansas City metro area, started to hear friends and family say they weren’t planning to take the coronavirus vaccine, she was frightened.
She took action. Lee joined the The Black Health Care Coalition to help provide accurate information about the vaccine’s importance to Black communities.
“I hope to get my vaccination this week and I’m eager to take advantage of this opportunity to save my life and to save the life of the people around me,” she said Monday during a coalition press conference promoting the vaccine.
According to an early December Pew Research poll, only 42% of Black respondents said they would receive a vaccine, compared with 63% of Hispanic and 61% of white adults. People of color were also less likely to enroll in vaccine clinical trials.
Lee said many who said they were hesitant to get the vaccine feared possible side-affects. But, she said, all medicines, from aspirin to insulin, have possible side affects.
“Taking the vaccine will save Black lives,” Lee urged. “The country as a whole will not be able to curb the virus through community immunity without Black people participating and getting the vaccine.”
So far, the metro has seen 113,599 infections and 1,376 deaths. Across the country, more than 20.7 million people have contracted the virus and 352,620 have died, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The pandemic has disproportionately hurt communities of color, who often have less access to medical care and health insurance. Communities of color are also more likely to have underlying health conditions and often serve as critical workers in factories, service industries and healthcare facilities.
Kansas and Missouri are among a few states where members of the Black community are dying of the virus at more than 2.5 times the rate of their non-Black counterparts, Lee said.
It doesn’t help that discrimination in healthcare as well as biases in treatment still exist, Lee said, referencing a video of a Black, female doctor in Indiana who died of the coronavirus after reporting that she was provided inadequate and racist care.
“We know that racism is still something that is within our healthcare system today,” said Councilwoman Melissa Robinson, who represents the city’s East Side. “We’re not ignoring that.”
But in the short-term, she said, it’s critical for Black Americans to make use of the vaccine’s “life-saving opportunity.”
The coalition is combating distrust and fear among communities of color that go back decades.
Experts, including Jasper Fullard, often point to the Tuskegee experiment, a decades-long federal study of syphilis that intentionally misled and mistreated Black study subjects, as a root cause of the mistrust.
That study, which began in the 1930s and lasted into the 1970s, led to new federal regulations that require transparency and oversight in scientific research.
Fullard, a retired Kansas City doctor, said that unlike during the Tuskegee study, which began in the 1930s and lasted into the 1970s, there are now federal regulations in place that require oversight during scientific research.
“We have a new day,” Fullard said. “We need to trust the vaccine.”
On the first day of the new year, Mayor Quinton Lucas received his first dose of the vaccine. He is among a chorus of Black leaders urging other Black Kansas City residents to do the same.
“I cannot stress enough the level of death and destruction that this virus has caused and this vaccine represents a light at the end of the tunnel,” said Leslie Fields, an internal medicine specialist and chair of the Greater Kansas City Medical Association. ”We really need to take this as a blessing, because it surely is one.”
The Black Health Care Coalition is hosting a community conversation Tuesday evening to discuss the vaccine and its impact on the African American community. The Zoom meeting, open to the public, will begin at 6:30 p.m.
