The top US public health official and chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, Dr Anthony Fauci, has emphasised the need for people of colour to be prioritised for Covid-19 vaccines.
“I think that’s the one thing we really got to be careful of,” Fauci told the New England Journal of Medicine. “Most of the people who are getting it are otherwise, well, middle-class white people.
“You really want to get it to the people who are really the most vulnerable … you don’t want to have a situation where people who really are in need of it, because of where they are, where they live, what their economic status is, that they don’t have access to the vaccine.”
Studies have found minority groups are more likely to test positive for Covid-19 than white people and are at higher risk of hospitalisation and death.
Last September, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Hispanic people were more than two and a half times more likely than white people to test positive. Black and Asian patients were nearly twice as likely as white people to do so.
Fauci, a key member of Donald Trump’s coronavirus taskforce who has spoken of a “liberating feeling” as he now works under the Biden administration, also noted the problem of vaccine hesitancy among communities of colour.
“You absolutely have to respect the hesitancy of the minority population,” he said. “They keep coming back and saying the history of Tuskegee.”
In Alabama, from the 1930s until the 1970s, hundreds of black men with syphilis were allowed to go untreated, in order for doctors to study the disease before and after death.
The experiment was uncovered by the Associated Press in 1972. The men sued and a settlement was reached. All the victims are now dead. The Trump administration blocked efforts to use money from the settlement to fund a museum.
People of colour “don’t, can’t and should not forget about it,” Fauci said, “because it happened and it was shameful”.
Public health officials, he added, must convince people of color “that the safeguards that have been put in place since then … would make it essentially impossible for a Tuskegee situation to arise again.”
In 2010, the US government apologised for an experiment carried out in the 1940s, in which Guatemalan prisoners and soldiers were deliberately infected with syphilis for the purpose of scientific research. The scientist who ran that experiment went on to work in Tuskegee.
