Village Project: ‘Take the Shot!’
During this time of Kwanzaa, a period of African American celebration of unity, thanks and appreciation, The Village Project, Inc. is taking this opportunity to call on African Americans, especially, and others as well, to become recipients of the coronavirus vaccine when it becomes available for the general public. In other words, “Take the Shot!”
Many of us who are African American have harbored a centuries-long distrust of government for good reason, given the long history of medical abuse of African Americans during the period of enslavement to such “studies” as the horrific Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on African American men that resulted in deaths and lifelong physical impairments and the decades-long, racist “sterilization” operations performed on African American women, Native American women and other women of color as a few examples of the historical reasons for this distrust. Health care practices to this day continue to alienate African Americans in such a way as to help continue and broaden glaring health care disparities on which the coronavirus pandemic has shone an even brighter light.
However, like many other African American-led organizations in this state and across the country, to include the NAACP, churches and civic organizations, we have come to the realization that what we are faced with is a pandemic that kills African Americans and other people of color for that matter, far out of proportion to their percentages of the population in our area and in this country. The issuance of the vaccine is not being done in a clandestine manner or focused on a certain ethnicity or singular group of people. Instead, it is in the process of being distributed broadly and openly to people across all the human boundaries created by racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like.
Black medical practitioners, to include Dr. Leon McDougle, president of the National Medical Association, served as consultants if not members of the teams of medical scientists who created and tested the vaccines.
One member of the team that developed the vaccine is an African American woman doctor named Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett who is the lead scientist for coronavirus research at the National Institute of Health. She and Dr. McDougle are two of many leaders in the field who are calling on African Americans to “Take the Shot.”
A special source of inspiration is the fact that in New York, the first person to take the shot was an African American nurse named Sandra Lindsey who is a critical care nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center. The person who gave her the shot is a doctor named Michele Chester, MD, who is the director of Employee Health Services at Northwell Health. The picture of the two of them giving and receiving the vaccine was on the front pages of newspapers across the country.
Following suit, the current U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who is also African American, took the shot on national television. He did this to show African Americans that there was nothing for African Americans to fear. This should serve as encouragement for all of us “to take the shot” and be around to celebrate many more Kwanzaas and other special holidays to come.
We are always mindful of the fact that the initial reason for our founding was to meet the unmet clinical and other needs of our underserved African American community. This led to our broadened mission statement of “helping our communities reach a greater state of wellbeing through communitybased culturally specific services.” We believe this commentary is very much in accordance with that mission statement.
Mel Mason is a long-time community activist and civil rights leader. He is the co-founder of The Village Project, Inc., a communitybased organization in Seaside that provides culturally focused psychotherapy and other supportive services to African Americans and other historically underserved populations in Monterey County.