People of color have been largely underrepresented in vaccine testing in the United States for the past decade, according to a new study released Friday by researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Harvard, Emory and other institutions.
The study, which examined data from 230 vaccine tests with about 220,000 participants, found that whites constituted the majority, or 78%, of participants in tests carried out between June 2011 and June 2020.
Blacks, however, accounted for 11% of participants, Hispanics accounted for 12%, and Native American / Alaska Native Americans accounted for 0.4%.
The study, published in the JAMA Network Open, comes at a time when the country is fighting a Covid-19 pandemic that disproportionately affected people of color. Health leaders are working to combat mistrust of vaccines among blacks and browns, saying the injection is the key to preventing further devastation in their communities.
Blacks and Latin Americans are dying from Covid-19 at a rate three times higher than whites and being hospitalized at a rate four times higher, according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Researchers are now advocating for greater diversity in vaccine testing, saying it will help deal with vaccine hesitation, address safety concerns and educate communities of color. They also note that many vaccine tests have failed to fully report participants’ demographics.
“This collaborative work highlights a problem that has plagued the scientific community for a long time – inadequate representation in clinical trials,” said Dr. Steve Pergam, associate professor in the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “The diversity seen in Covid-19 vaccine tests demonstrates that we can do this, but we need to ensure that future studies focus not only on rapid enrollment, but also on inclusion.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN last year that he wanted to see people of color enrolled in Covid-19 vaccine tests with twice the percentage of the population because their communities were hard hit by the pandemic. The USA is 12% black and 18% Latin.
But last summer, the researchers said they were struggling to recruit people of color to test Covid-19 vaccines. For example, in August, blacks and Latinos accounted for only 10% of the 350,000 people who signed up for a coronavirus clinical trial.
Moderna struggled to increase the number of blacks in its vaccine tests, but the company did not reach the levels suggested by Fauci.
Black leaders say that many black Americans have refused to enroll in tests because they do not want to be “guinea pigs” for vaccine testing due to the racism record in the country’s medical research. They cited Tuskegee’s 1932-1972 experiments that recruited 600 black men – 399 who had syphilis and 201 who did not – and monitored the progression of the disease by not treating men when they died or suffered serious health problems.