A few hours after receiving the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice, president of Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM), says she was “feeling great.” Rice, who says she has “a history of participating in clinical trials,” received her first dose of the vaccine on December 18 with CNN anchor Sanjay Gupta to raise awareness and public trust in the vaccine.
Rice and MSM are part of a group of higher ed professionals, doctors and public health experts known as the Black Coalition Against COVID, which is working to address community concerns and dispel misconceptions about the disease and the vaccine and to inspire trust in the medical community around these issues to hopefully save Black lives.
This is no small feat.
“Black folks’ mistrust in the medical system really stems from enslavement,” says Dr. Veronica Newton, an assistant professor of sociology at Georgia State University. She is working with a research team studying COVID-19 research participation in the Black community.
From the gynecological experiments conducted on enslaved African American women without anesthesia, to the forced sterilization of Black women after emancipation as a form of social control, to the Tuskegee experiments that withheld treatment for Syphilis from infected Black men, to even more recently not believing Black women and putting their lives at risk during childbirth, there has been systemic institutional violence against Black bodies by the medical community, Newton says.
“I think it’s really important that we remember that it’s institutional racism and sexism that has led Blacks to mistrust medical professionals, not just, ‘Oh, Black people don’t have a trust of medical professionals,’” she says. “It’s more than Blacks all having a bad experience with a specific type of doctor. It’s across all facets and specificities within the medical field.”
These disparities don’t only affect poor Black people. Dr. Geden Franck, an assistant professor in the school of medicine at Texas A&M University, pointed out how a lack of cultural responsiveness has impacted patient care.
