For as much hope as I had when I received my vaccination, it almost all vanished over the past week as it feels like the scene from “The Godfather III” where Michael Corleone thinks he’s gotten out, but is pulled back into a world of violence. But for me, it’s back into this senseless new pandemic of the unvaccinated.
I’m frustrated too. Unlike many wars and mass tragedies, in the war against COVID, most of the public does not get to see the bodies carried off of the battlefield.
But I have.
As a double-boarded physician in both emergency medicine and internal medicine, I’ve seen husbands and wives come in with COVID infections where one lives and one dies. I have surprised young people with a diagnosis of COVID pneumonia. I’ve put on double masks and I’ve put on house wrap in times when we didn’t have enough traditional protective gowns for care.
It’s easy to slide into a place of indignant anger with those who think that the disease is not real. In this situation, I want to ask how they think my uncle died. It’s obnoxious to hear anti-vaxxers opine about becoming magnetic or obtaining 5G capabilities after the shot.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
However, there’s one argument for not getting vaccinated that I find hard to refute. “I’m Black. So why should we start trusting the medical system now?”
To be sure, vaccination represents our best option to get to the other side of this pandemic and, further, any individual’s best option to avoid hospitalization or death.
The fact is that I’ve been Black since the ‘70s, practicing medicine since the ‘00s, and trying to be part of the solution in Atlanta for more than 10 years.
However, this is not a problem for one man or for one year. The repair here will take more than just me and a lot of time in therapy. That said, I’ve found that approaching this relationship works best with some humility.
The medical system has betrayed the trust of the Black community for hundreds of years and this would have been the case without the most-mentioned example that took place at a college in Alabama with untreated syphilis. I work in a hospital where I still have patients who refer to the hospital as “The Gradys,” a term harkening back to when there were separate buildings for Black and white patients. Up until the hospital I currently work in was desegregated in 1965, there were parts of wings where Black patients could not be treated. It won’t be until the year 2041 when Grady will have been desegregated longer than it was segregated.
My Grady badge says “essential worker” on the back. Although not intended to do so, it helps me relate to when typhoid fever ravaged Philadelphia. There, Black essential workers went to fight on the front lines under the erroneous assertion that they were immune to the disease, only to die in droves.
But these atrocities are not limited to decades ago. In 1992, a study conducted in Atlanta was published where researchers tricked Black people into obtaining a urine drug test under the guise of a check for STD’s and then suggested that Black patients (of note; there were almost no white participants in this study) are dishonest about their drug use.
The fractured relationship between healthcare and the Black community can fill tomes, from tales of disparity about pain medication prescribing to children with long-bone fractures to outcomes with COVID itself.
Yes, everyone eligible should take this safe vaccine.
Yes, Black people were involved in many aspects of the vaccine’s creation and its administration.
No, there’s not a reason for the Black community to suddenly start blindly trusting American healthcare.
But perhaps, the fact that rich, privileged, white people were fighting to be first to get the vaccine back in January doesn’t quite fit the exploitation narrative.
Seriously though, with our eyes wide open, this vaccine is your, my, our best option to survive this.
Anwar Osborne, M.D., M.P.M., is an associate professor in the department of emergency medicine at Emory University School of Medicine.
About the Author
