CHICAGO (AP) – At a makeshift vaccination center in a Chicago hospital with a safety net, a patient care assistant introduces an older woman with a cane to a curtain booth.
“Here’s a place right here,” Trenese Bland says with help, preparing the woman for a shot while providing protection against the virus that devastated their black community. But the nurse has doubts about her own inoculation.
“It’s not something I can trust now,” says Bland, 50, who worries about how fast COVID-19 vaccines have developed. “It’s not something I want in me.”
Only 37% of the 600 doctors, nurses and care staff at Roseland Community Hospital were vaccinated, even though health workers are first in line. Many obstacles come from the largely black working-class neighborhoods surrounding the hospital, areas heavily affected by the virus but affected by vaccination reluctance.
The irony did not escape the organizers of a vaccination campaign at the 110-bed hospital, which until recently was overflowing with coronavirus patients. If seeing COVID-19 up close and personal is not enough to persuade people to get vaccinated, what will it do?
Resistance is confusing Dr. Tunji Ladipo, an emergency physician who has seen the disease devastate countless patients and their families and often works side by side with unvaccinated colleagues.
“Why don’t people who work in health care trust science?” I don’t understand that, “he said.
Health experts emphasized the safety of vaccines, noting that their development was unusually rapid, but based on previous research, and those used in the US showed no signs of serious side effects in studies of tens of thousands of people. But a history of abuse has contributed to distrust of the medical institution among black Americans.
In a recent poll by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 57% of black Americans say they have received at least one shot or intend to be vaccinated, compared to 68% of white Americans.
Black Americans surveyed by the National Infectious Diseases Foundation cited reasons for hesitation in vaccination, which are the subject of those of Roseland employees.
The trinket-free five-story red-brick hospital opened nearly a century ago in the southern part of Chicago. Adjacent to a shopping center, auto parts and gas station, the backyard is a residential street marked by houses with a covered frame and three-apartment apartment buildings.
Doctors, nurses and staff are almost all black, as are patients.
It would be hard to imagine that not everyone is aware of the amazing health inequities that affect the city’s black community and others across the nation.
Black people make up 30% of Chicago’s population, but at the start of the pandemic, more than half of COVID-19 deaths. This gap has narrowed, although disease disparities explain why the risk persists, including high rates of high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. Black people are more likely to have jobs that do not provide health insurance or the luxury of working safely at home in a pandemic.
Neighborhoods on the South Side lag behind the wealthiest whites in obtaining COVID-19 test sites, and recent city data show that COVID-19 vaccinations to black and Latin American residents are far behind. white residents.
With insufficient staff among hospital workers, Roseland offered some of its doses to city police and bus drivers. Representatives of the hospital are looking for ways to raise awareness and increase vaccination rates – posters, stickers, education sessions.
They even recently brought in the veteran for civil rights, Rev. Jesse Jackson, to get his first movie in the room.
“African Americans were the first victims of the crisis, they cannot be the last to seek remedies,” Jackson said before the inoculation.
Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a black U.S. government scientist who helped develop the Moderna vaccine, accompanied Jackson. She acknowledged “centuries of medical injustice” against black Americans, but said COVID-19 vaccines are the result of years of solid research. She said confidence in these vaccines is needed to save lives.
Rhonda Jones, a 50-year-old nurse at the hospital, treated many patients with severe COVID-19, a relative died of it, and her mother and nephew were infected and recovered, but she continues to survive. .
The vaccines “came out too quickly” and were not properly tested, she said. It does not rule out vaccination, but not soon.
“I always tell my patients, just because a doctor prescribes you medicine, you have to ask; you don’t take it just because, ”Jones said. “Nursing school teachers have always told us, if in doubt, check it out.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, the hospital cafe was closed for two months, when a worker there became infected. However, hospital administrator Elio Montenegro said that when he asked canteen staff about their vaccination, “each person said, ‘No, I don’t get it.’
Adam Lane, the cook, said he did not trust the US government. He believes that political pressure has led to vaccines on the market and fears that those administered in black communities are different and more risky than those offered to whites.
“I am tired of COVID. I think we all just want it to end, “Lane said. “But I don’t want to lose my soul for a quick vaccine.”
Dr. Rita McGuire, an obstetrician and infection control specialist in Roseland, says fighting vaccination misinformation and mistrust is a daily battle. Many workers have not forgotten those studies in which they used us as experiments, “said McGuire, including the famous Tuskegee researcher. on black patients with syphilis.
Many also worry about the severe side effects of the vaccine, but these are extremely rare, McGuire tells them.
Some say they will wait until spring or summer to get vaccinated. With infection rates still high and more contagious virus variants appearing, “it’s too late,” McGuire said.
___
Follow AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner at @LindseyTanner.
___
The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is receiving support from the Department of Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. AP is solely responsible for all content.