Oscar-winning actor Benicio Del Toro lost his uncle to Covid-19 exactly a year ago, and his brother, the chief medical officer of a New York City hospital, contracted the virus on the front lines of the fight against the pandemic. .
“That’s why I have been kept up to date, almost play-by-play, on the incredible challenges that frontline and health workers have faced in 2020,” Del Toro said at a news conference on Tuesday.
But he saw “a light at the end of the tunnel” in December as the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine began nationwide. Several weeks later, his brother spoke to Del Toro about his concerns about low vaccination coverage in Latino communities.
“When I asked him why, he said one of the reasons was the lack of truthful information and the lack of coverage,” said Del Toro. Then the Puerto Rican actor decided to team up with actor Zoe Saldana to launch a bilingual campaign to combat misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine in an effort to encourage more Latinos to get vaccinated.
As the nation prepares to meet President Joe Biden’s latest goal of shooting 200 million shots in his first 100 days in office, campaigns like Del Toro’s are bringing with them a new sense of urgency, as all Americans from 16 and older are now eligible to receive vaccinations.
The video campaign features Dr. Gustavo del Toro, chief medical officer at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, answering questions from both his brother and Saldana to clear up some of the most common misconceptions about Covid-19 vaccines in Latino communities and beyond.
The disproportionate speed with which Latinos and other colored communities experienced complications from and died from Covid-19 over the past year led public health officials to push for an equitable distribution of vaccines.
On April 20, the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention reported that race and ethnicity were known in only 55 percent of people who received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccination. Nearly two-thirds of this group are White (64 percent), 12 percent are Hispanic, 9 percent are Black, and 6 percent are Asian.
Covid-19 has killed at least 69,199 Latinos since the start of the pandemic. Most of them died at a much younger age, according to the CDC, and at a rate nearly three times that of the country’s white population.
The staggering loss of young Latino lives, particularly those in their 30s and 40s, led to a reduction in the overall life expectancy of Latinos more than three times that of white people, according to a peer-reviewed study published in February by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Of all the people who got the vaccine in the trials for the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, not a single person died of the Covid-19 infection. So in my mind the most important thing is they’re equal,” Dr. Gustavo Del Toro said when his brother and Saldana asked which Covid-19 vaccine is better.
The Del Toro and Saldana videos will be distributed with the help of the advocacy group Momento Latino and the SOMOS Community Care networks, which provide health services in New York.
“It’s great that we can work with them because they can really help spread the word to our Latinx communities and anyone who will listen,” said Del Toro. “We don’t intend to tell people what to do. We just want to get the information out about the vaccines and then let people make their own decisions.”
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