Story at a glance
- “We don’t want in the beginning that most of the people who are getting it [the vaccine] are otherwise, well, middle-class white people,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said during an interview with the New England Journal of Medicine.
- “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,” he said.
- Reluctance to receive the vaccine has shown to be higher among communities of color who have been exploited by the public health system in the past.
The nation’s top infectious diseases expert is emphasizing the need to prioritize people who live in underserved communities when it comes to administering COVID-19 vaccinations across the country.
The coronavirus has disproportionately affected minority communities and people of color over the course of the pandemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Black Americans are hospitalized at nearly four times the rate of white Americans and die from COVID-19 complications at nearly three times the rate.
Our country is in a historic fight against the Coronavirus. Add Changing America to your Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news.
Meanwhile, Latinos are more than four times more likely to be hospitalized and nearly three times more likely to die from COVID-19 compared to whites.
As the critical effort to vaccinate Americans kicked off last month, there have been reports that Black and Latino Americans are receiving the vaccine at a significantly lower rate than white people.
“We don’t want in the beginning that most of the people who are getting it [the vaccine] are otherwise, well, middle-class white people,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during an interview Thursday with the New England Journal of Medicine.
“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,” he said.
Reluctance to receive the vaccine has shown to be higher among communities of color who have been exploited by the public health system in the past and who still face worse health outcomes compared to white people, partly due to unequal access to health care.
“You absolutely have to respect the hesitancy of the minority population. They keep coming back and saying the history of Tuskegee,” Fauci said, referring to the 1932 experiment in which the federal government denied African American men treatment for syphilis and documented how the disease destroyed their bodies over decades.
Fauci said health officials must work to ensure people of color know safeguards are in place that make it essentially impossible “for a Tuskegee situation to arise again.”
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CORONAVIRUS RIGHT NOW
CDC SAYS RISK OF CORONAVIRUS IN SCHOOLS IS SMALL
BIDEN SETS AGGRESSIVE COVID-19 TIMELINE FOR RETURN TO NORMALCY IN AMERICA
NEW DRUG MAY BE POTENT AGAINST THE CORONAVIRUS
A HOMEGROWN CALIFORNIA MUTATION OF COVID-19 MAY BE TO BLAME FOR RECENT SPIKE
MASSIVE FIRE RAGES AT WORLD’S LARGEST COVID-19 VACCINE MANUFACTURER
changing america copyright.
