With painstaking effort, Black doctors’ group takes aim at Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy

Black doctors' group takes aim at Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy A professional society of African American doctors is trying to learn about communities' concerns — and address them. Eric Boodman STAT

In September, after the Food and Drug Administration authorized Covid-19 treatments based more on presidential puffery than on clinical data, some physicians decided to take matters into their own hands.

Specifically, the National Medical Association, a professional society of African American doctors, formed its own in-house FDA to vet the data when the official one seemed not to be. At first, the task force was framed as a stand-in — another instance in the long history of Black leaders stepping in where the government had failed. And eventually, its members did review the results and endorse the emergency authorizations for both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines.

But they’ve moved beyond mere recommendations. They’ve also taken on the slower, more painstaking work of building and maintaining patients’ trust in these vaccines. As Rodney Hood, one of the physicians on the NMA task force, put it, “We realize that Black people are at the highest risk for coronavirus but the least likely to want to take the vaccine, so we’re trying to reverse that.” ....

You can’t look at that hesitancy at face value. Centuries of inhumanity — that’s not easily forgotten,” said Gabrielle Perry, a clinical epidemiologist who works at a private health system in New Orleans, who is not involved with the NMA. What she means is that American medicine has a long history of both abusing and excluding people of color.

“Medical professionals have to understand that the fear of Covid-19, which is this invisible looming foe, that fear does not always outweigh the very clear and well-documented danger of going to a health care system that has proven itself to be as deadly as disease,” Perry said. She pointed to the forced sterilization of poor, disabled, and Black women through much of the 20th century as just one of many examples.

Given that history, it’s perhaps not surprising that NMA task force members — in meetings and webinars organized with churches, universities, fraternities, sororities — often hear concerns about how the vaccine might affect fertility. “I’ve been on a town hall just about every day,” said NMA President Leon McDougle, a professor of family medicine and chief diversity officer at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. “These convenings are also informing discussions with the pharmaceutical company scientists that are producing the vaccines, so that when we meet with them, these are questions we can ask.”

To McDougle and his colleagues, what’s important is hearing those questions without judgment, posing them to vaccine manufacturers, and then bringing back real, transparent answers to the next town hall. ...

When we look at all these online strategies — campaigns on social media, a chatbot — we don’t really know yet what is really effective,” said Ève Dubé, a senior researcher at the Québec National Institute of Public Health, and an invited professor of anthropology at Laval University. Because our opinions are often influenced more by our relationships than official public service announcements, to her, it’s best if the message is local, community-specific — even if that’s more expensive and time-consuming. “When it’s someone you know, your doctor, your nurse, your neighbor, your priest, we know that that’s what’s the most effective,” she said. ...