CHICAGO (AP) – At an improvised vaccination center in a safety net in Chicago, a patient service leads an elderly woman with a stick to a booth with curtains.
“Here, sit here,” Trenese Bland says helpfully, as she prepares the woman for a shot that will protect against the virus that has ravaged their black community. But the assistant is unsure whether she will get her own vaccination.
“It’s not something I trust now,” said Bland, 50, who is concerned about the speed at which the COVID-19 vaccines were developed. “It’s not something I want in me.”
Only 37% of the 600 doctors, nurses and support staff at Roseland Community Hospital have been vaccinated, even though the health workers are at the forefront. Many holdouts come from the predominantly black, working-class areas surrounding the hospital, areas badly affected by the virus yet plagued by vaccine reluctance.
The irony has not escaped the notice of the organizers of a vaccination campaign at the 110-bed hospital, which until recently was packed with coronavirus patients. If a closer look at COVID-19 isn’t enough to convince people to get vaccinated, then what is?
The backlash confuses Dr. Tunji Ladipo, an emergency department doctor who has seen the disease devastate countless patients and their families, often working side by side with unvaccinated colleagues.
Why wouldn’t people who work in health care trust science? I don’t understand that, ”he said.
Health experts have underlined the safety of the vaccines, noting that their development was unusually fast, but based on years of previous research and that the vaccines used in the US have shown no signs of serious side effects in studies involving tens of thousands of people. But a history of abuse has contributed to the medical establishment’s distrust among some black Americans.
In a recent poll by The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 57% of black Americans said they had received at least one injection or were planning to get vaccinated, compared to 68% of white Americans.
Black Americans surveyed by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases cited reasons for vaccination hesitation that match those of Roseland workers.
The no-nonsense hospital, five stories of red brick, opened its doors on the far south side of Chicago almost a century ago. Adjacent to a shopping street, auto parts store and gas station, the backyard is a residential street with boarded-up pockmarked houses and three-apartment blocks of flats.
Doctors, nurses and staff are almost all black, as are the patients.
It is hard to imagine that no one is aware of the dizzying health inequalities that plague the city’s black community and others across the country.
Black people make up 30% of Chicago’s population, but more than half of COVID-19 deaths at the start of the pandemic. That gap has narrowed, although the disease differences that explain this risk persist, including high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. Black people are more likely to be in jobs that don’t offer health insurance or have the luxury of working from home safely during a pandemic.
South Side neighborhoods lagged wealthier whites in getting COVID-19 test sites, and recent city data shows that COVID-19 vaccinations in Black and Latino residents are far behind white residents.
Without enough customers among the hospital employees, Roseland has offered some of his doses to city police and bus drivers. Hospital representatives are looking for ways to raise awareness and increase vaccination coverage – posters, stickers, educational sessions.
They even recently brought in the veteran civil rights leader, Reverend Jesse Jackson, to get his first shot on camera.
“African Americans are the first to fall victim to the crisis, may not be the last to seek a cure,” Jackson said before his inoculation.
Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a black American government scientist who helped develop Moderna’s vaccine, joined Jackson. She acknowledged “centuries of medical injustice” against black Americans, but said COVID-19 vaccines were the result of years of thorough research. Trust in those vaccines, she said, is necessary to save lives.
Rhonda Jones, a 50-year-old hospital nurse, has treated many patients with severe COVID-19, a family member died from it, and her mother and a cousin were infected and recovered, but she’s still holding out.
The vaccines “ just came out too soon, ” and haven’t been tested enough, she said. She does not rule out being vaccinated, but not soon.
“I always tell my patients, just because a doctor prescribes medicine for you do you have to ask; you don’t just take it, ” said Jones. “Nursing school teachers always told us to check when in doubt,”
At the beginning of the pandemic, the hospital’s cafeteria was closed for two months when an employee there became infected. Still, hospital administrator Elio Montenegro said when questioning cafeteria staff about vaccination, “everyone said, ‘No, I’m not getting it.'”
Adam Lane, a cook, said he doesn’t trust the US government. He thinks political pressure has brought the vaccines to the market urgently and fears that the vaccines given in black communities are different and more risky than the vaccines offered to whites.
‘I’m tired of the COVID. I think we all just want it to be over, ”Lane said. “But I don’t want to lose my soul for a quick vaccine.”
Dr. Rita McGuire, an obstetrician and infection control specialist at Roseland, says fighting misinformation and mistrust about vaccinations is a daily battle. Many workers “have not forgotten those studies where they used us as experiments,” said McGuire, including the infamous Tuskegee study. on black patients with syphilis.
Many are also concerned about the serious side effects of the vaccine, but they are extremely rare, says McGuire.
Some say they wait until spring or summer to get vaccinated. With infection rates still high and the emergence of more contagious virus variants, “that is too late,” said McGuire.
Follow AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner on @LindseyTanner
The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.