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Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

mattbruenig.com

61–70 of 74 posts

Re: Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

#61

Not sure how great of a source this is - but black people at all education levels seem to be about ~8% less likely than the general population to get vaccinated [1]. However, black people at most education levels are poorer than the average population (unfortunately) - and according to this chart - poor people are also much more likely to not be vaccinated [2]. You can't really make any conclusions from the two chart…

https://xkcd.com/985/

Re: Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

#62
post #28

Either the government should have swiftly mandated total lockdown and vaccination, or they should not have said a tweet about covid response and delegated to medical professionals and scientists. The real tragedy is that covid and vaccines have even entered the political sphere of discourse in the first place. Act swiftly with the best interest of your people at heart and face consequences later, or let the virus win…

I mean come on dude, which world were you living in the last 18 months? Trump and the GOP have heavily pushed covid into the political sphere. The right wing has worked relentlessly to frame the pandemic in the most political frame possible. To try to pull some kind of 'well its really all sides' or 'all politicians ' that is doing a disservice to the truth of history. There's a major difference between 'not wanting…

‘They would like to have the people come off. I’d rather have the people stay [on the ship]. But I’d go with them. I told them to make the final decision. I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.’ — President Trump

Re: Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

#64

Has anyone tried actually surveying the black community for an explanation?

It is not the black community that has to be surveyed, it is about asking those black people who don't want to take it why they don't want to take it.

It is not about surveying everyone.

Re: Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

#65
TL;DR summary: No, but "Tuskegee experiment" is a convenient story and easy excuse.

More interesting would be a comparison of COVID vaccination rates (among American blacks) with their acceptance rates of routine childhood vaccinations, tetanus or rabies vaccines following an injury or wild animal bite, and similar.

Re: Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

#66
Many black people's view of healthcare in America is already negative, https://theundefeated.com/features/new-poll-shows-black-amer... and negative experiences are often communicated first and second-hand. Black americans are also more willing than other groups to believe in genocidal conspiracy theories,

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2569474/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16009745/

There is an ongoing awareness of the Tuskegee experiment in the black community because in every group discussion (among just black people) of the covid vaccines I've observed someone will bring it up.

That said, I'd say it is just one piece of America's extensive history of race-targeted abuse that black Americans are hyper aware of and fuels belief in nonsense conpsiracies.

It does receive quite a lot of outsized attention in media like NPR and academia, to which the original article appears to be responding.

Re: Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're that concerned about getting the "wrong" vaccine, you could just lie about your race when you sign up (of course, that would only deepen the racial divide in vaccination statistics)

Hold up, you have to state your "race" (whatever that means) when you sign up for the vaccine in the US?

I did. Almost all government adjacent forms ask you to specify your race. There's even a standard one when you get hired somewhere. There is almost always a 'decline' option, for whatever that is worth.

Re: Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

#68

Not sure how great of a source this is - but black people at all education levels seem to be about ~8% less likely than the general population to get vaccinated [1]. However, black people at most education levels are poorer than the average population (unfortunately) - and according to this chart - poor people are also much more likely to not be vaccinated [2]. You can't really make any conclusions from the two chart…

Re: poorer - my partner needed the car on the day I had scheduled a jab, so I had to walk/train. The appointment, as a whole, cost an entire morning . I can work around that, but the practical issues are obvious. A friend's anecdotal evidence was that skepticism was U-shaped as a function of age - there were older black people much more likely to have close experience of mistreatment. For reference I'm not in the US…

In case you're interested, here's a recent preprint that breaks down the demographics of vaccine hesitancy: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...

Re: Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're that concerned about getting the "wrong" vaccine, you could just lie about your race when you sign up (of course, that would only deepen the racial divide in vaccination statistics)

Hold up, you have to state your "race" (whatever that means) when you sign up for the vaccine in the US?

Yeah, presumably that's how they gather these stats on vaccination rates across race/age/gender

Re: Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conspiracy theories don't even make sense within their own universe any more. At a mass vaccination clinic, there is no "black line" or ""white line", people just randomly get in line, and since a vial has multiple doses in it, it's obvious the same vial serves all races of people in the line. Favorite recent meme I saw "People who believe in conspiracy theories have never been project managers." That is, when you kn…

It's not about how ridiculous the conspiracy theory is when considering the full context. Obviously it's not the case that the US is using the COVID vaccines to experiment on certain races while excluding others. It's about why someone might believe such a thing and what you can to do to try to convince them otherwise. "They use the same vials" isn't a great argument to give to a skeptic. Unless you manage to get in…

"Back rooms"?? Where I got vaccinated was on a big basketball court where there were rows and rows of vaccination stations. It was all literally out in the open where you could simply watch who was getting vaccinated.
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