NEW YORK (Reuters) – When a major healthcare organization asked AR Bernard, the black head of a Brooklyn megachurch, to serve on a committee tasked with driving the adoption of COVID-19 vaccines in New York City color communities , he objected.
Bernard, who heads the Christian Cultural Center, the largest church in the city, said he declined the offer because he feared some members of his congregation might view his participation as “ joining forces with the system ” to help African Americans ‘to be used as guinea pigs. ”For vaccines developed in record time.
Like most of the dozens of black faith leaders Reuters interviewed, Bernard was unwilling to show public support for an inoculation he thinks he doesn’t know enough about and risks jeopardizing his community’s trust.
“We are concerned that it is being tested on individuals of color,” said Bernard, referring to people who would get the vaccine early in the public rollout. Black people made up about 10% of the vaccine trial volunteers, compared to 13.4% of the US population.
The pastor was hospitalized with the virus in March and said he wanted to “wait and see” more information about the side effects of the vaccine.
The reluctance to recommend vaccination is striking because black pastors have played a key role in educating their communities about the risks of COVID-19 to African Americans, who are 2.8 times more likely to die from it than white Americans. said the American centers. for disease control and prevention (CDC).
Public health officials hope black faith leaders and other black role models will help alleviate strong skepticism among African Americans about the safety of the vaccine, which is distributed nationwide. The shots are critical to ending a pandemic that has killed more than 300,000 Americans to date, health experts say.
According to a Reuters / Ipsos poll this month, only 49% of black Americans would be interested, compared to 63% of white Americans. The poll found that black people, like whites, are put off by the speed at which the COVID vaccine is being developed and the Trump administration’s confused coronavirus response. The black pastors also mentioned the deep-seated distrust of the medical world among members of their communities.
“What we are dealing with now is the byproduct of … generations of mistrust, suspicion, and fear about the workings of medical systems,” said Edwin Sanders, head of the Metropolitan International Church in Nashville, Tennessee, involved in this. has been. with public health education since HIV / AIDS hit in the 1980s.
The mistrust is rooted in decades of unequal health care access and treatment, underrepresentation in clinical trials, and a track record as unwitting subjects, such as in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study that continued until 1972, in which syphilis treatment was withheld from infected black men without their knowledge.
Pastors said this history has fueled fears that the COVID-19 vaccine may not work in black Americans, or that they may be getting a different shot from the rest of society.
“I cannot tell my people in good faith to accept this wholesaler, but I am also not trying to support any kind of baseless conspiracy theories. It’s a tightrope I have to walk here, ”said Earle Fisher, pastor at the Abyssinian Missionary Baptist Church, a congregation of about 50 in Memphis, Tennessee.
Of the 12 black church leaders interviewed, all said they thought the vaccine was necessary to end the crisis, but only one was willing to endorse it outright at this point.
Most said they wanted more information to educate their parishioners about how the vaccine works in the body, where to get it, and possible side effects.
“As a minister and as a health worker, I can see why people should take it, because of the devastation I’ve seen. But I also understand why the African American community doesn’t trust it because of the way we’ve been treated in the past, ”said Reginald Belton of the First Baptist Church of Brownsville in Brooklyn, who also provides pastoral care in a hospital.
Belton said he planned to take the vaccine and provide more information to members about it, but he did not say he would approve it.
The importance of black religious leaders in promoting vaccines was underscored this month by a CDC report, which found that health officials were successful when they partnered with African American churches to educate medically disadvantaged communities.
Black churches have long played a vital role in the social well-being of black Americans, perhaps best known during the civil rights movement.
BUILD TRUST
The ministers interviewed by Reuters said the local government and other public officials must build trust in their faith communities to increase the acceptance of vaccines among black Americans.
Elijah Hankerson III, chief of the Life Center International, Church of God in Christ in St. Louis, Missouri, said the results of the clinical trials, showing that the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are more than 90% effective , are not enough for him to promote a vaccine.
But if St. Louis officials vouch for the vaccine, and his legal team and church health department say it’s okay, Hankerson said he would promote it on his webcasts and social media, which reach a combined audience of about 70,000.
“Data is one thing,” said Hankerson, who lost his uncle and two colleagues to the virus. “If there are people we trust who can vouch and say, ‘Hey, this is for the benefit of the people, get this out,’ we wouldn’t mind doing it.”
The National Medical Association, an organization of black health care providers, tried to give that assurance to black Americans on Monday when, after an independent review of clinical trial data, it announced support for the U.S. government’s urgent approval for the Pfizer and Moderna shots.
Anthony Evans, the president of the National Black Church Initiative, a coalition seeking to reduce inequalities in health care, said he expected black churches to eventually come on board to mobilize people to get vaccinated.
Some faith leaders encourage the vaccine despite their own hesitation, seeing little alternative.
Pastor George Waddles of Second Baptist Church in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a congregation of about 400 people, previously had doubts about vaccines. He was given the flu shot for the first time in 2019 because he previously thought it could make him sick.
But seeing the suffering caused by COVID-19 has motivated him to encourage his parishioners to take a leap of faith and get vaccinated.
“We have three options,” Waddles recalls during a virtual prayer call this month. “Vaccination, Isolation or Decimation.”
Reporting by Gabriella Borter in New York and Makini Brice in Washington, edited by Ross Colvin and Cynthia Osterman