Jesse Jackson’s message: ‘Take the vaccine’
Civil rights leader addresses hesitancy among minorities
Accompanied by an African American scientist at the forefront of COVID-19 vaccine development, the Rev. Jesse Jackson got his shot against the virus Friday at Roseland Community Hospital, as he praised the safety of the immunization and addressed vaccine hesitancy in minority communities.
After the injection, the civil rights leader and president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition raised his fist in the air and appeared to smile behind his protective face mask. He received the Pfizer vaccine, the first one to get federal emergency use authorization last month.
“Take the vaccine,” Jackson said to the crowd of health care workers and reporters who watched him get vaccinated in a small tent outside the South Side hospital. “Take the vaccine now.”
By his side was Kizzmekia Corbett, an immunologist at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health and a lead scientist in the development of the Moderna vaccine, which received federal emergency authorization a week after the one by Pfizer.
Corbett became a national icon for vaccine safety last month when her boss and the nation’s lead infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci praised her work while addressing vaccine fears in the Black community.
“So, the first thing you might want to say to my African American brothers and sisters is that the vaccine that you’re going to be taking was developed by an African American woman,” Fauci said. “And that is just a fact.”
At Roseland, Corbett said the COVID-19 vaccine “is one of the only ways we’re going to get out of this pandemic,” and stressed the multiple, lengthy trials that proved its safety and efficacy.
She also spoke of how much of the reluctance to get vaccinated stems from the nation’s history of medical abuse of minority communities, aswell as continuing racial disparities in health care and misinformation about vaccines.
“I know we are not going to get over the hump of vaccine hesitancy in this one instance,” she said. “But hopefully as time progresses we can start to rebuild some of that trust and really open up those lines of communication from the scientific perspective back to the communities so we can get the ball rolling and start to save lives from COVID and other diseases.”
While all races have reported some degree of hesitancy to take the new vaccines against COVID-19, several recent polls show Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to refuse to get immunized against the new virus than other groups.
Just 24% of Blacks and 34% of Hispanics intend to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, in contrast to 53% of whites, according to a report last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago.
Minority respondents also expressed more ambivalence about getting the shot, with 41% of Hispanic Americans and37% of Black Americans saying they’re not certain whether they’ll get immunized, the poll found.
Those reporting the highest rates of vaccine hesitancy are also the most at risk of contracting — and dying from — the novel coronavirus. Black and Hispanic patients are about four times more likely to be hospitalized because of COVID-19 and 2.8 times more likely to die of thenew virus than those who are white, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics.
Roseland Community Hospital CEO Tim Egan said he hoped Jackson receiving the vaccine would assuage fears and convince others to get the shot.
Jackson also helped spread the message of vaccine safety to employees at the hospital — volunteer work that technically made him eligible to get the COVID-19 vaccine, since hospital volunteers are permitted to receive the shot during this first phase of rollout, said Elio Montenegro, hospital spokesman, during a phone interview.
But Montenegro also likened Jackson’s vaccine to the public vaccination of national leaders such as Vice President Mike Pence, who received the shot on live television in mid-December to reassure Americans that the immunization is safe.
“On a much grander scale, (Jackson) has a pulpit, he has a megaphone to get the word out to minority communities to get them vaccinated and reassure them that it’s the right thing to do,” Montenegro said. “We are going to do whatever we need to do to get as many people vaccinated as possible.”
During the event Friday, Egan touted the hospital’s aggressive COVID-19 testing program developed early in the pandemic, testing over 25,000 people in the neighborhood and across the city.
“We want to do the same thing with the vaccination,” he said.“We took the testing on the road. We went out into the communities where people live and we gave them the test. Wewant todo the same thing with the vaccine.”
Yet he expressed concern about those who are skeptical of the vaccine— particularly some of his own hospital employees who have expressed reluctance to get the shot. Hospital leaders have said roughly a quarter of employees indicated that they intend to forgo the immunization.
Egan referenced one hospital employee who worried about getting the shot after reading about an unfounded side effect on Facebook.
“Well, there’s one specific fact I know about Facebook,” Egan said. “It sure as hell didn’t graduate from medical school. Here at Roseland, we’re with the scientists. We’re with Dr. Corbett. We’re with Dr. Fauci. We’re with the vaccine.”