Targeting disparities in treatment
Policymakers, health professionals ready to address racial gap in vaccine accessibility
Doctors, policymakers and public health professionals in Connecticut are working to ensure that racism does not prevent Black people from accessing a coronavirus vaccine.
They face a number of obstacles, fromclinical trials that typically enroll more white patients than Black and Latino people, to questions about accessibility and cost of a vaccine to a long history of racism perpetuated by the medical establishment.
State Sen. Douglas McCrory, a Democrat from Hartford, hosted a forum on the issue Monday night. He said he has three questions about a vaccine: Will it be safe? Will it be accessible? And will it be affordable?
“Black people should not shun lifesaving research, indeed we cannot afford to do so,’’ McCrory said at the forum, which was held via Zoom. “However we must carefully scrutinize research initiatives before becoming the subject of those initiatives, especially in the case of COVID-19, a virus that has devastated our community.”
Nationally, Black and Latino people have been three times as likely as white people to become infected with COVID-19 and twice as likely to die. Several vaccines are in various stages of development, but none are expected to be available to the general public for at least several months, likely longer, public health experts say.
Once a vaccine is widely available, it may be met with mistrust by some Black Americans, whohave endured generations of racist treatment by the medical establishment, said Dr. Wizdom A. Powell, the director of the Health Disparities Institute at UConn Health and a professor.
“What we are bearing witness to ... is rooted in an unfortunate reality,’’ Powell said, “and that is a history of medical malice and experimentation that dates back not just to Tuskegee and the infamous study of untreated syphilis and Negro males but rooted in a series of medical exploitation committed against people who had less power than those who had power over them.’’
Black men, in particular, have a deep mistrust of the medical establishment that is based on their own experience of racial discrimination, she said.
Black churches can play a crucial role in convincing communities of color that a vaccine is safe, said Rev. Robyn Anderson, executive director for the Ministerial Health Fellowship and pastor of the Blackwell AMEZion Church.
She noted that Black people don’t participate in clinical trails as frequently as whites, “so it’s important howwedeliver this information and whodelivers the information.”
However, churches are just one part of a much larger effort, said Trevor Johnson, a lecturer at Central Connecticut State University.
“Hartford has a tremendous number of clergy who are leaders who are providing the right message to people but we know church attendance is down,’’ Johnson said. “We also know that certain age groups are not represented in the church community and it’s also not inclusive” of the Black
community as a whole.
Ultimately, health care professionals have a responsibility to address structural racism within medicine. “COVID is the subject matter today but COVID is not the problem,” said Dr. Reginald J. Eadie, president and CEO of Trinity Health of New England and co-chairman of an advisory panel charged with devising a statewide strategy for distributing a vaccine. “It is the symptom but not the disease.’’
Dr. Albert Icksang Ko, professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Yale School of Public Health, said the racial disparity is evident in COVID treatment. While death rates have fallen sharply from last spring’s highs, Black and brown patients still can face more serious illness.
Medical professionals have to address those gaps and work to ensure similar disparities aren’t part of the vaccination process, he said.
“A vaccine that is only effective for a portion of our population and leaves behind others promotes social injustice,’’ Ko said.