Black doctors on tackling the myths that fuel vaccine hesitancy

Black doctors on tackling the myths that fuel vaccine hesitancy Black doctors serving Black communities are feeling exasperation after months of wading through myths and misinformation about Covid and the authorized vaccines. NBC News

.... Dr. NanaEfua B.Afoh-Manin (an emrgency physician) is an advocate for equity in public health whose organization, Shared Harvest, launched myCovidMD. The initiative, which offers free coronavirus testing through mobile sites, has a network of “culturally competent health care volunteers” to respond to Covid-related needs in Black communities and other communities of color.

“You see this day in and day out, and you don’t know how to convince people to take the vaccine, because there’s literally a block,” she said. “We politicized the vaccine. We polarized the nation before it came out, and now there’s much work to do to just build trust together as a unit, as a nation. It’s a battle. We can’t get folks vaccinated, and it has nothing to do with the vaccine now.”

Afoh-Manin’s exasperation mirrors that of many Black health officials who are contending with myths and misinformation about Covid-19 and an often unquantifiable aversion to the three vaccine options the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other medical organizations say have proven their effectiveness in preventing Covid-19 or minimizing its effects.

According to the CDC, about 63 percent of fully vaccinated people in the U.S. were identified by race or ethnicity. Within that, about 9.3 percent of all fully vaccinated people are Black; 12.4 percent of the general population is Black. Black Americans are also getting vaccinated at a rate slightly higher than their share of the population in recent weeks, according to the CDC, at 14.6 percent. 

Still, misinformation has been a hurdle in getting people comfortable with the vaccines more broadly. A World Health Organization study this year said that nearly 6,000 people around the world were hospitalized in the first three months of 2020 and that 800 died because of coronavirus misinformation. ...