In his last tweet, Hank Aaron sent a message to black Americans that coronavirus vaccines are safe.
“I was proud to receive the COVID-19 vaccine earlier today at Morehouse School of Medicine,” he wrote on Twitter on January 5. “I hope you do the same!”
After Aaron died at age 86 on Friday, some vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccination advocates joined the tweet to spread misinformation about the vaccine.
The Fulton County Medical Examiner office said on Monday that Aaron, considered one of the greatest versatile players in baseball history, died of natural causes.
But that didn’t stop people from suggesting otherwise, on social media, including the audio-only Clubhouse app. On Twitter, anti-vaccination activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote that Aaron’s death was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths“related to the vaccine.
Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular biology and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, predicted this would happen.
“I am terribly saddened by the loss of Hank Aaron, one of my important childhood heroes,” Hotez tweeted Friday. “In the meantime, I’m getting ready for the reaction of those who will try to exploit this and try to attribute his death to a #covid vaccination.”
Hotez, the author of “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism”, said that this is the “modus operandi” of antivaxxers.
“They are opportunists,” he said in an interview on Monday. “They will try to grab everything they can.”
They also try to specifically target African Americans with their messages, he said.
“So that was kind of like two birds with a stone for them,” said Hotez, referring to Aaron’s death.
Aaron was publicly vaccinated with other civil rights leaders this month in Georgia to reassure and encourage black Americans – many of whom, experts say, do not trust coronavirus vaccines – to do the same.
Dr. Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean of Emory University School of Medicine, said the public nature of Aaron’s decision proved to be a double-edged sword.
“We have made your vaccination public so that it can be used to increase vaccination,” said del Rio on Monday. “Unfortunately, as his vaccination was made public and he later died, we now have a small boomerang effect that comes to haunt us because he died.”
But in reality, del Rio said he “has absolute confidence that his death has nothing to do with the vaccine, but that he is old and fragile”.
Del Rio said coronavirus vaccines are safe and effective and prevent people from dying from the deadly virus that killed more than 400,000 people in the United States
Both Hotez and del Rio said that one fact that they believe many people are missing is that nearly 2 million Americans over 65 die each year.
“If you are vaccinating a large number of people over 65, several will die from causes unrelated to the vaccines,” said Hotez. “So, explaining this is very important.”
It is worth remembering, del Rio said, that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the majority of people who died of Covid-19 in the United States by January 16 were people aged 65 and over.
“I would rather have the vaccine than Covid,” said del Rio.
Sandra Lindsay, a Jamaican-born intensive care nurse who was the first person in New York to receive the vaccine, said distrust in the black community stems from past harmful practices, such as the Tuskegee study in which US health workers left untreated syphilis in black men without their consent to analyze the effects. Lindsay said the study is often referred to by patients, including children.
“People keep coming back to this,” Lindsay said in an interview on Monday. “We know it was harmful and inhuman and painful and harmful.”
Lindsay said she offered to be one of the first to get the coronavirus vaccine at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, where she is the director of intensive care nursing, because she wanted to “inspire people who look like me”.
“When people talk to me about their fears, I never reject that,” said Lindsay, 52. “I am a black woman. And I know what happened in the past, and it is something that I had to fight for.”
Since the beginning of the pandemic, some black celebrities have faced adverse reactions for taking unfounded coronavirus conspiracies to a population with great distrust in medical research.
R&B singer Keri Hilson was widely criticized for falsely linking the coronavirus to 5G networks in social media posts last March. Afterwards, Hilson said that at the request of his management, she deleted videos and articles that she helped elevate and that, whatever its cause, the virus is “a real thing”. And in December, singer and actor Tyrese Gibson was criticized for writing in an Instagram post that one of his secrets to getting rid of Covid is to sleep at 30 degrees every night. The World Health Organization said: “Exposing yourself to the sun or temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius (75 degrees Fahrenheit) does not prevent or cure COVID-19.”
Lindsay believes that the responsibility lies with healthcare professionals and others in the medical community to educate people and address their vaccine concerns.
“Encourage them to ask questions,” she said. “And to involve and educate them to dispel some of those conspiracy theories.”