Austin Anglin, 67, a resident of The Open Hearth mens shelter, receives the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 ... [+]
Despite continued media coverage of vaccine hesitancy in the Black community, outreach and conversations with the Black people reveal many are actively seeking the Covid-19 vaccination or are willing to accept it once available. Many of those who aren’t quite there yet simply want trusted, credible health information.
Willingness to get Covid-19 vaccine has increased across racial/ethnic groups
These experiences are supported by recent data from the Kaiser Family Foundation which show vaccine acceptance rates among Black people is increasing. Their data also show vaccine acceptance rates among Blacks are not far behind other racial groups. From September to December 2020, vaccine hesitance decreased by 14% and vaccine acceptance increased by 12%.
Most notably, the percentage of Black Americans saying they will not accept the vaccine is a mere 12%. This means 88% are somewhere on a decision spectrum that includes contemplation, a desire to learn more, and possibly or definitely obtaining vaccination.
Furthermore, according to Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, President and Dean, Morehouse School of Medicine, the school has distributed the Moderna vaccine during their Community Vaccine Saturdays events and the vaccination slots are fully booked for the rest of the month. Rice says, “We have witnessed an overwhelming response with more than 1,000 calls and emails to obtain more information and appointments for vaccination. We have provided a lot of good information to the public and have worked proactively to seek understanding about issues and concerns and address them with compassion and facts.”
To continue moving people along the vaccine acceptance continuum, trusted, credible information about the vaccine must be delivered by credible messengers in places where Black Americans are consuming health information. Rather than perpetuating narratives about vaccine hesitancy, what if we channeled energy and resources into ensuring the Black community has answers to lingering questions about the vaccine? The three most common concerns I receive about the vaccine include:
Not wanting to go first People perceive the vaccine as being too new and want to wait to see the experiences of others. Over 70,000 people voluntarily participated in the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials, with over 36,000 receiving the vaccine. Therefore, anyone getting the vaccine now, after FDA approval for use of the vaccine, is not going first. The volunteers did.
Choosing to wait a year to observe side effects in vaccine recipients First, the side effects of this and any other medication or vaccine are largely identified during Phase I of the clinical trial. The purpose of Phase I is to identify the side effects which determines safety. There are were no deaths, life threatening or debilitating complications discovered in Phase I of the US vaccine trials. The side effects of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been published and are consistent with those research participants have been reporting. Second, March will mark one year since the first vaccine trial participants received the mRNA vaccine. The side effects are known because of the participation of these volunteers. Finally, in a global society with billions of people who have diagnosed and undiagnosed medical conditions, rare side effects may emerge and these may ultimately be unrelated to the vaccine.
Believing the vaccine was developed too quickly In general people rarely understand the clinical trial process or research implementation timelines. The moniker ‘Operation Warp Speed’ and the general politicization of the pandemic led many to distrust the process. The vaccine was developed quickly for many reasons including an overabundance of volunteers immediately willing to participate in the research and removal administrative and bureaucratic barriers enabling the approval process to proceed faster than usual. In addition, the usual timeline for vaccine development requires learning about the pathogen of interest, in this case, coronavirus. The family of coronaviruses has been around and well-known to scientists for decades. It causes the common cold and is globally known for emergence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) epidemics in Asia. Therefore, scientists were able to act quickly once the virus and its genetic makeup were identified by Chinese scientists.
However, the most compelling reason the vaccine development proceeded so quickly is because mRNA science not new. Scientists like Katalin Kariko began conducting mRNA research over three decades ago. Dr. Barney Graham, a virologist and vaccine researcher at NIH who oversaw implementation of the Moderna vaccine Phase I trial, has been working on vaccine techniques similar to mRNA since 1990 and on mRNA vaccines, specifically, for eight years. The approach used to develop the Covid-19 vaccine was based on previous research by Graham and colleagues in 2013. Graham says, “Because we had been working on it for so many years before the pandemic, mRNA is now an important vaccine delivery technology that can be rapidly manufactured. Advances in mRNA development and delivery have made it an important addition to the vaccine toolbox.” In other words, basic science research like vaccine development is about repeating experiments and learning from failure until you perfect the science. The development of mRNA vaccines represents a scientific advancement that should be celebrated.
Over time, addressing questions like these from the Black community will yield even higher vaccine acceptance rates. Fortunately, organizations like the Black Coalition Against Covid and Choose Healthy Life, a science-based program that prepares Black clergy to address Covid-19 and increase vaccine acceptance, will continue to serve as trusted information resources for the Black community. Debra Fraser-Howze, founder of Choose Healthy Life and the National Black Leadership Commission on Health says, “Vaccine hesitancy is no longer as prevalent because we are doing a good job having diverse and trusted voices deliver information to the community. We have a legacy of trust in Black communities and this can’t be done with business cards from outsiders, we have to do it ourselves.”
Through efforts like these, there is now a body of experience supporting the need to shift the vaccine narrative away from hesitancy and the Tuskegee Syphilis study, to acceptance.
Acknowledging past and present injustices in research and healthcare remains vital. But because Black Americans are among those suffering and dying from Covid-19 at alarming rates, working toward vaccine acceptance in the Black community is imperative. Doing so does not dismiss or dispute the legacy of bias, racism and mistreatment endured by Black and brown people in the US. Fraser-Howze says, “Now we have to move forward together and continue to educate [the Black community] about the protections now in place to ensure something like Tuskegee never happens again. We need people to know many Black people are not distrustful of the vaccine.” Dr. Montgomery-Rice agrees and summed it up best, “We are seeing vaccine acceptance from the community. People want to take these vaccines to protect themselves, the people they love and our communities from the virus.”
