MLB manager to Black community: COVID vaccine won’t be like infamous Tuskegee study
Houston Astros manager Dusty Baker is urging one of the nation’s most at-risk communities to have faith in the COVID-19 vaccine as it begins to roll out.
On Monday, the MLB’s three-time National League Manager of the Year spoke directly to the Black community about getting vaccinated on a video call to reporters.
Baker highlighted the contributions of leading immunologist James Hildreth, a Black man who was on the panel of health experts who voted to recommend FDA approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
“There was an African-American doctor that was in charge of the vaccine,” Baker said. “I felt more comfortable that he and other African Americans were on the boards to come up with the vaccine.
“And he guaranteed that it wouldn’t be another Tuskegee kind of experiment. And he urged Black Americans to use the vaccine.”
What is the Tuskegee experiment?
The Tuskegee experiment was a 40-year study that mislead Black participants who were infected with syphilis about their health status. The study lasted from the 1930s into the 70s.
“Many people of color have good reason not to trust the government or the health care system, and we’ve got to remember that while a lot of the framing is often political,” Surgeon General Jerome Adams said in an interview with McClatchy, “and there is no doubt that there is a higher level of distrust for this administration. It goes back well beyond or before this administration.”
The study deliberately withheld the treatment of penicillin from its participants after it was found to treat syphilis, with the research eventually resulting in the death of 28 participants from the disease and 100 more from related complications, USA Today said.
In September, the presidents of Dillard University and Xavier University of Louisiana, two historically Black colleges in New Orleans, Walter M. Kimbrough and C. Reynold Verret co-wrote a letter to students and staff urging Black individuals and other communities of color to ensure that the vaccine trials are “racially diverse,” McClatchy News wrote.
“Our communities have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, with harrowing consequences for the lives and health of our fellow citizens,” the letter read. “Overcoming the virus will require the availability of vaccines effective for all peoples in our communities, especially our black and brown neighbors.”
Baker’s words came the same day that Sandra Lindsay, a Black nurse in New York, became the nation’s first person to be administered the COVID-19 vaccine outside of a clinical trial.
“That was the goal today,” Lindsay told the New York Times. “Not to be the first one to take the vaccine, but to inspire people who look like me, who are skeptical in general about taking vaccines.”
Other celebrities urging communities to trust the vaccine
Baker is following in the footsteps of former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton in announcing their intentions to get the COVID-19 vaccine and urge communities to do the same. The latter three may potentially get the vaccine on live television, which is what Elvis Presley famously did to push the polio vaccine in 1956, Stat said.
In October, Politico obtained a report titled “PSA Celebrity Tracker” which is consists of 34-pages worth of celebrities the Health and Human Services Department was requesting ”take part in a PSA touting the administration’s coronavirus plan,” W Magazine wrote.
The list wasn’t regarding a public vaccination campaign specifically, however, but rather in support of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response.
Black Americans and the virus
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that Black Americans are 1.4 times more likely to contract COVID, 3.7 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 2.8 times more likely to die from the virus than white Americans.
“Because we are most susceptible to not only catching it, but dying from it,” Baker said during the reporter call.