CHICAGO – At a makeshift vaccination center in a hospital with a safety net in Chicago, a patient care assistant leads an elderly woman with a cane towards a curtained cubicle.
“Here, sit well here,” Trenese Bland says helpfully, preparing the woman for an injection that offers protection against the virus that has devastated her black community. But the advisor has doubts about how to get her own vaccine.
“It’s not something I trust right now, ” says Bland, 50, who worries about how quickly the COVID-19 vaccines were developed.” It’s not something I want for myself. ”
Only 37% of Roseland Community Hospital’s 600 doctors, nurses and support staff were vaccinated, although health professionals are first in line. Many resisters come from working-class neighborhoods around the hospital, mostly black, areas hard hit by the virus, but reluctant to the vaccine.
The resistance confuses Dr. Tunji Ladipo, an emergency physician who has seen the disease devastate countless patients and their families, and often works side by side with unvaccinated colleagues.
” Why would people who work in healthcare not trust science? I don’t understand that, ” he said.
Health experts stressed the safety of vaccines, noting that their development was exceptionally rapid, but based on years of previous research and those used in the United States, have shown no signs of serious side effects in studies of tens of thousands of people. But a history of abuse has contributed to distrust of the medical establishment among some black Americans.
In a recent survey by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 57% of black Americans said they received at least one injection or planned to be vaccinated, compared with 68% of white Americans.
Black Americans interviewed by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases cited reasons for hesitation about vaccination that echo those of Roseland officials.
The five-story red brick basic hospital opened its doors nearly a century ago on the southern tip of Chicago. Next to a shopping mall, auto parts store and gas station, its backyard is a residential street marked by wooden houses and three-story apartment buildings.
Doctors, nurses and staff are almost all black, as are patients.
It would be difficult to imagine that anyone was unaware of the surprising health inequalities that afflict the city’s black community and others across the country.
Blacks make up 30% of Chicago’s population, but at the beginning of the pandemic, more than half of COVID-19 deaths. This gap has narrowed, although the disparities in diseases that explain this risk persist, including high rates of hypertension, diabetes and obesity. Blacks are more likely to have jobs that do not offer health insurance or the luxury of working safely at home during a pandemic.
Neighborhoods in the South Zone lagged behind wealthier whites in obtaining COVID-19 test sites, and recent city data shows that COVID-19 vaccinations in black and Latino residents are far behind white residents.
Without enough buyers among hospital staff, Roseland offered some of his doses to city police and bus drivers. Hospital representatives are fighting for ways to raise awareness and increase their vaccination rates – posters, stickers, educational sessions.
They even recently brought in veteran civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson to get his first photo on camera.
“African Americans were the first to be victims of the crisis, they cannot be the last to seek medicine,” said Jackson before his vaccination.
Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a black scientist from the US government who helped develop the Moderna vaccine, accompanied Jackson. She acknowledged “centuries of medical injustice” against black Americans, but said the COVID-19 vaccines resulted from years of solid research. Trust in these vaccines, she said, is necessary to save lives.
Rhonda Jones, a 50-year-old nurse at the hospital, treated many patients with severe COVID-19, a relative died of it and her mother and nephew were infected and recovered, but she is still resisting.
The vaccines “came out too fast” and were not tested properly, she said. She doesn’t rule out being vaccinated, but not anytime soon.
” I always tell my patients, just because a doctor prescribes medicine for you, you have to ask; you don’t accept it just because, ” Jones said. “Nursing professors have always told us, when in doubt, check”,
At the beginning of the pandemic, the hospital cafeteria closed for two months when a worker was infected. Still, hospital administrator Elio Montenegro said that when he questioned the cafeteria staff about vaccination, “everyone said, ‘No, I can’t do it'”.
Adam Lane, a cook, said he does not trust the US government. He thinks that political pressure has caused vaccines to reach the market and fears that those administered in black communities are different and more risky than those offered to whites.
“I am tired of COVID. I think we all just want it to end, ” Lane said. “But I don’t want to lose my soul for a quick vaccine. ”
Dr. Rita McGuire, an obstetrician and infection control specialist in Roseland, says combating misinformation and distrust of vaccines is a daily battle. Many workers “have not forgotten the studies in which they used us as experiments,” said McGuire, including Tuskegee’s infamous survey of black patients with syphilis.
Many are also concerned about the serious side effects of the vaccine, but these are extremely rare, says McGuire.
Some say they will wait until spring or summer to be vaccinated. With infection rates still high and the emergence of more contagious virus variants, “it’s too late,” said McGuire.
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Follow AP Medical writer Lindsey Tanner at @LindseyTanner.
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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.