‘It’s not the science we distrust; it’s the scientists’: Reframing the anti-vaccination movement within Black communities

ABSTRACT

The anti-vaxx movement is often associated with conspiracy theories and dismissed as being ‘anti-science’. However, scepticism from Black communities must not be read as being ‘anti-science’, but rather ‘anti-scientist’ due to endemic racism in medical communities and structural inequalities in healthcare. Since slavery and its aftermath – such as through the case of Henrietta Lacks, and now through the Covid-19 pandemic – the devaluation of Black life has been highlighted through the failure to acknowledge and address health disparities amongst racialised and Black peoples [primarily in the United States]. Although the development of a vaccine is an important step in fighting Covid-19, its development and distribution need to be done so safely and in conjunction with addressing the needs and concerns of Black communities, who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• vaccine
• anti-vaccination
• racism
• medical apartheid

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and –1972 by the U.S Public Health. The purpose of the study was to observe untreated syphilis in African American men. The men were compensated with free medical care, meals and burial insurance for participation in study. However, none of the men were informed that they had syphilis or were treated with penicillin after the antibiotic was proven to successfully treat it (Skloot, 2011).

2 John River began to develop a ‘crushing feeling’ in the back of the head following a spinal tap procedure, and as a result underwent a two-year ‘medical nightmare’ as doctors continually ignored and/or dismissed his symptoms. River adds that he experienced multiple instances of racism, including a nurse who accused him of visiting the hospital [solely] to get drugs (as both a user and dealer) (Favaro et al., 2019).

3 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's approval process consists of four phases; Phase I studies, also referred to the first-in-human- studies are the riskiest (and most profitable) of the clinical trials because the purpose of these studies are simply to figure out what a medication does to a ‘normal’ functioning body (for example, does it make one's heart stop or make one vomit?). In Phase I there are no medical advantages/ benefits. Additionally, in Phase I, Black men are also largely overrepresented (Stark, 2020). In these trial clinics, participants are typically kept in lock-in, windowless, residential facilities. In her book, Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals, Jill Fisher found that participants that identified as White were more likely to be participating in their first trial, whereas those who had participated in multiple studies typically identified as Black. ‘Serial participants’ are more likely to be more vulnerable and in need of money due to a lack of employment, debt, low levels of education or a prison record due to inequalities in education, employment, and the criminal justice system/ prison industry (Stark, 2020).

4 In a report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), they proposed a place-based approach and distributing vaccines in low-income areas (Samuel, 2020).

5 Two of the four HBCU medical schools – Morehouse School of Medicine and Meharry Medical College – are clinical trial sites (O’Neal, 2020).

6 This action must also be reconciliatory with the past; only by grappling with the historical and social basis for vaccine hesitancy, can meaningful progress be made.

7 In one study, Black respondents were twice as likely to trust a messenger of their own race (Owens, 2020).

8 According to Dr. Mark Burns, an infectious disease specialist and assistant professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine With the rapid development of the vaccine, Covid-19 is a ‘distant cousin’ of the SARS illness, and a vaccine has been under development since then, as well as decades of work on mRNA vaccines (Kachmar, 2021; Jagannathan, 2020).