Some skeptical as vaccinations start
Least trust in shot within hardest-hit populations
Dr. Lyle Ignace rolled up his sleeve and got his shot, one of the first in Milwaukee to receive the COVID-19 vaccine last week.
“Easy peasy,” he said from behind a face mask on a Facebook livestream. “I hardly felt anything.”
It took all of about 20 seconds to administer the shot. There was a brief round of applause and some cheers from people gathered in a small room at the Gerald L. Ignace Indian Health Center. Ignace pumped his fist in celebration. The video has been seen more than 15,000 times.
Ignace, a member of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin and the Coeur D’Alene Tribe of Idaho, hopes his example will project confidence in the vaccine’s effectiveness and safety and persuade more Indigenous people to get it once it becomes more widely available.
“I do believe in the benefits of science and the benefit of vaccines,” he said.
The pandemic has fallen the hardest on Black Americans, Latinos and Indigenous people, who are more likely than white people to get seriously ill from the virus or to know someone who has been hospitalized or died.
But many of them also tend to have less faith in government, less trust of medical scientists and lower rates of vaccination for other diseases such as influenza. Because of these trends, public health care professionals worry they will be less likely to accept the COVID-19 vaccine.
The vaccine, the first doses of which were administered last week, will not be widely available to all Americans for months, but federal health officials have predicted that anyone who wants a vaccine will be able to get one by the spring or summer. Health care and long-term care workers and residents will be first in line to be vaccinated. Two vaccines have been approved for emergency use so far by the federal government. They were developed in less than a year — the fastest development timeline in history.
But convincing some Americans to get the vaccine will be a challenge.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in November found Black Americans were among the least inclined to get vaccinated for COVID-19. About 42% said they would definitely or probably get the vaccine, compared with 63% of Hispanics and 61% of white people. The survey did not have statistics
on Indigenous people.
Health care professionals understand why people of color may be reluctant to take the vaccine. They point to a history of forced sterilization, unethical experimentation and other abuses by medical professionals. Some people also are concerned about the speedy development of the COVID-19 vaccines and the politics surrounding the effort.
“It’s really, really important to acknowledge the history that has created, for very good reasons, mistrust in healthcare systems,” said Shiva BidarSielaff, vice president and chief diversity officer at UW Health.
Bidar-Sielaff, Ignace and other health care professionals say the key to boosting trust in the vaccine is giving people the information they need to make a decision, amplifying trusted voices within their communities and underscoring the benefits.
In the Black community, mistrust stems from cases like the Tuskegee study in the mid-20th century, when researchers left unsuspecting Black men untreated for syphilis for decades , even after it was discovered that penicillin could cure the disease. It also stems from the case of Henrietta Lacks, a cancer patient whose cells were harvested for research without her knowledge in 1951.
In Indigenous communities, centuries of broken promises have undermined trust in the federal government, which has led efforts to develop a vaccine.
Black, Latina and Indigenous girls and women also have been subjected to government-backed sterilizations, often without their informed consent or under coercion. In 1973, two Black sisters, ages 12 and 14, Mary Alice Relf and Minnie Lee, were sterilized by physicians with a federally-funded clinic. Thousands of Indigenous women were sterilized by physicians with the Indian Health Service in the 1970s.
The rapid development of the vaccines is another issue for some people. A vaccine developed by Pfizer and the German biotechnology firm BioNTech was the first to win approval, quickly followed by one developed by Moderna. Both were fast-tracked by federal
Dr. Lyle Ignace, executive director of the Gerald L. Ignace Indian Health Center, was one of the first people to get the COVID-19 vaccine in Milwaukee last week. He received the shot during a Facebook livestream. SUBMITTED
regulators.
“We’re used to vaccines taking years,” said Dr. Kevin Izard, president of Cream City Medical Society, a chapter of the National Medical Association, which was formed in 1895 by Black doctors forbidden from joining the American Medical Association. “And here’s a virus we just discovered and found out about at the beginning of the year, and we have a vaccine coming out that’s being mass produced.”
It’s important to listen to those concerns, health professionals say.
“That worry that they think there’s going to be unintended consequences or that there are some underreported side effects of taking the vaccines, those are all real concerns,” said Zeno Franco, an associate professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin, who has been working on outreach campaigns in Milwaukee’s south side.
Still, it’s critical that people of color, who are among the most susceptible to severe illness and death from COVID-19, get the vaccine, Franco and Bidar-Sielaff said.
“We are losing lives daily,” Bidar-Sielaff said.
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services reports that Latinx residents have almost twice as many cases of COVID-19 per capita as white residents. Black residents have about 2.3 times more hospitalizations than white residents, and a higher death rate, according to DHS. Native Americans in the state have the highest number of deaths per capita of any race or ethnicity tracked by the state of Wisconsin.
Public health officials hope that as the vaccine rolls out, more people will be open to taking it.
“I think the good news is we’ll also have the experience of having vaccinated many health care workers and longterm care residents” by the time the vaccine is more widely available, said DHS Deputy Secretary Julie Willems Van Dijk. “So people will be able to see how this has gone through these first phases of vaccination.”
The Pew survey in November found that overall more Americans were in favor of taking the vaccine than in September. Some Americans surveyed were taking a wait-and-see approach. About half of the people who said they wouldn’t get the vaccine said they could change their minds as more information comes out.
About 20% said they did not intend to get vaccinated and were “pretty certain” they would not change their minds.
Patricia McManus, founder of the Black Health Coalition, said she is using her platform to educate communities of color about the vaccine.
“Our job is not to tell them what they need to do. My role is to give them the information,” she said. “Some people may make them feel bad and say, ‘Oh, they’re ignorant,’ but they still have the right to make a decision even if it’s a bad one.”
When met with questions or skepticism, Ignace points to data showing that in trials both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were close to 95% effective in preventing COVID-19.
“I try to give the facts. I try to be as straight and honest and direct as I can,” he said.
Two days after he received the vaccine, Ignace walked viewers of the clinic’s weekly COVID-19 livestream through the minimal side effects he experienced after vaccination — some tiredness and a sensation of joint stiffness that went away with an Ibuprofen.
“If this is all that I’m going to experience related to COVID by getting a vaccine ... I’ll take that over having COVID any day,” he said.
Sarah Volpenhein is a Report for America corps reporter who focuses on news of value to underserved communities for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Email her at svolpenhei@gannett.com. Please consider supporting journalism that informs our democracy with a taxdeductible gift to this reporting effort at JSOnline.com/RFA.