Racism, disease, and vaccine refusal: People of color are dying for access to COVID-19 vaccines

Abstract

As the vaccines against COVID are slowly becoming available, we need to consider the paradox of why so many people of color are dying from the disease yet cannot get the vaccinations.Concerns focus on vaccine refusal but lack of access is the bigger problem.In the early 1900s as knowledge of germ theory spread, the Atlanta Constitution newspaper in Georgia editorialized that "Germs Know No Color Line," an early reminder that bacteria do not stay segregated by race [1].In 2021, unless at least 70% of us get vaccinated or have longterm immunity from having had COVID, we will have proven that "Viruses Know No Color or Ethnicity Lines [2]."Yet widespread beliefs that the virus is no worse than the flu, that masks and social distancing are not necessary, and that the vaccination is more dangerous than the disease will hamper our ability to get to herd immunity.Such beliefs, when they become actions, will prolong the pandemic.Now that the vaccines are becoming available, albeit too slowly as we try to stop the spread of the virus, we need to consider the paradox of why so many people still seem to be resisting the injections even as they are difficult to get.To explain "vaccine hesitancy" we need a more nuanced read of history and contemporary realities.We must consider why so much focus is on vaccine refusal, rather than on the lack of access to the vaccine and healthcare in general.The concern with vaccine hesitancy has been laid primarily at the feet of African American and Latinx communities in the United States.Study after study appears to show that more Black and Brown people, out of proportion to their numbers in the population, are getting sick and dying from COVID-19 compared with whites, yet resisting the vaccinations because of mistrust [3].Rather than a nuanced analysis for this mistrust of conventional medical care, however, we routinely hear a litany of historical explanations.In Black communities, a holy trinity of medical horror stories are trotted out: Dr. J. Marion Sims' use of slave women for gynecological experimentation, the 40-year study in Tuskegee of "untreated syphilis in the Male Negro," or the taking of Henrietta Lacks' cervical cancer cells to begin the first reproducible cell lines.In the Latinx communities, the explanations focus more on requirements to present government-issued identification, mistrust of government sponsorships given the

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