Infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci stressed the need to address racial disparities in the COVID-19 vaccination process, in an interview with The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday.
What he says: ‘I think that’s all we really need to pay attention to. We don’t want to at first … most of the people who get it are different, well, middle-class white people. ‘
‘You really want to get it to people that are really the most vulnerable … you don’t want to have a situation where people who really need it, because of where they are, where they live, what their economic status is, they don’t have access to the vaccine. “
- “You have to have absolute respect the hesitation of the minority population. They keep coming back and telling about the history of Tuskegee, ” said Biden’s chief medical officer, referring to a situation in the 1930s when the federal government refused to treat black men in Alabama for syphilis and secretly documented how the disease left their bodies for decades. long destroyed.
- “They cannot and must not forget it because it happened and it was a shame. “
- Biden’s chief medical adviser noted that health officials must convince people of color “that the precautions put in place since then … would make it essentially impossible for a Tuskegee situation to arise again. “
The big picture: In the 16 states that released race-by-race vaccination data, white residents have been vaccinated at a rate often two or three times that of blacks, Axios’s Caitlin Owens writes.
- People of color are at a higher risk of contracting the coronavirus and also have higher COVID-related death rates than Caucasians.
- Colored communities also typically have fewer pharmacies per capita, making it more difficult to get vaccinated, and they distrust the process due to past medical malpractice.
- Immigrants who are not fluent in English face additional barriers to entry.
Go deeper: Color communities falling behind America’s vaccination effort