Vaccine Distrust in Hardest Hit Communities Threatens School Reopening Plans

For Black and Latino families hit hard by the coronavirus, vaccine distrust runs high.
“We have been talking about this since April — the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color,” says Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. “And this is an opportunity for us as a country to step up and not just acknowledge or shine a light on it but say, ‘What are we really going to do about that?’” (FRANCINE ORR / LOS ANGELES TIMES/GETTY IMAGES)
SCHOOL OFFICIALS IN districts that enroll the majority of the country’s Black and Latino students, including many of the country’s big city school districts, are counting on the coronavirus vaccines to allow them to reopen safely for in-person learning — every day, for all students.

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But as states start administering the first vaccines in what’s expected to be a historic distribution campaign to inoculate hundreds of millions of Americans, pediatricians and school and public health officials have a major hurdle to overcome: how to convince vaccine-hesitant Black and Latino families — and especially Black parents who harbor a warranted distrust in the health care system and in immunizations specifically — that the vaccine is safe and effective and the gateway to reopening schools.

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“Black people have every right to be suspicious of vaccinations,” says Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. “We need to acknowledge that. Don’t put that off. We need to acknowledge that and then say, ‘OK, how do we get past that?’ because the Black community is disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. They need to be in line for those vaccinations and they need to get them, so what are we doing as educators, as trusted voices in those communities, to work collaboratively with the community?”

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Though parent-specific polling is hard to come by — education organizations are just beginning that work now — the most recent surveys show a staggering lack of trust in the forthcoming vaccines among Black people. One Axios/Ipsis poll from Aug. 26 showed that just 28% of Black people planned to get the first-generation COVID-19 vaccine, compared to 51% of white people and 56% of Hispanic people.

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That distrust is for good reason: In the 1930s, the U.S. government tricked hundreds of Black men with the promise of free health care, food and housing into becoming part of the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” — a secret experiment, of which the participants were never told, that withheld treatment in order to study how the deadly venereal disease spread. That distrust carries over to today, fueled in large part by the unequal medical treatment of black patients compared to white patients, a phenomenon that’s been well documented for decades.

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“I always like to emphasize that this mistrust is earned,” says Patrice Harris, the first Black woman elected president of the American Medical Association, which she led until earlier this year. “Just as the mistrust has been earned, we can certainly go in and earn trust. But we have to make sure that it’s not a one-and-done proposition. There are issues in the past, but there are issues in the present, and we have to continue working in our community.”
[ READ: No Vaccine, No School? ]
To be sure, nearly 10 months since the pandemic took hold in the U.S. and shuttered school districts across the country, about half of the nation’s 50 million public school students are still learning virtually or through a hybrid model that includes in-person learning two or three days per week.

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But schools that enroll high percentages of Black and Latino students are much more likely to be all virtual than majority-white schools. And researchers are already amassing data about how that lack of in-person instruction and daily socialization is driving academic, social and emotional learning loss among Black and Latino students at a disproportionately high rate. A recent analysis by McKinsey & Company pegged that backward slide in math and reading at as much as 12 months.

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That’s to say nothing of the economic, housing and food crises they’re more likely to suffer.
In many cases, their school districts aren’t closed solely because of high infection rates in their communities. They’re also closed because they lack the resources to provide personal protective equipment and sanitization for students, educators and staff, reconfigure classrooms to adhere to social distancing measures and repair poor ventilation systems — to name just a few of the biggest challenges to reopening for in-person learning.

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And with Congress slow to provide a new round of relief despite a clarion call from education organizations who estimate schools need at least $175 billion to reopen safely, school and public health officials say their ability to cultivate trust in the vaccine among Black and Latino families is crucial to getting schools up and running for some of the country’s most vulnerable students who, when it’s all said and done, will have likely been set back the most by the pandemic.

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“We have been talking about this since April — the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color,” Pringle says. “And this is an opportunity for us as a country to step up and not just acknowledge or shine a light on it but say, ‘What are we really going to do about that?’”
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“What are we doing right now?” Pringle asks. “How are we thinking about vaccination distribution as a campaign? What resources are we putting in any COVID-19 relief package that addresses that right now so that we are not doing it after the fact?”
Despite the paralysis in Washington during this lame-duck session, some members of Congress have been working on a plan for months already, including Sen. Cory Booker, New Jersey Democrat, who has been urging Senate Republicans to agree to additional funding in the next coronavirus relief package to target communities that are home to people of color.

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“What I’ve been pushing for is robust funding for the communities in the most crisis,” he says. “We need to make sure that states and local communities have the money to get the job done. Without that robust funding, I fear that some places will face the same hiccups and barriers we saw and still have with comprehensive testing. And we know these challenges that we face are most difficult when it comes to Black and brown communities and low-income and poor communities.”

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Booker’s proposal would funnel money to grassroots, community-based organizations to expand ongoing efforts to eliminate inequity in COVID-19 health care outcomes, including vaccination campaigns by trusted, local organizations.
How a vaccine is introduced to the public is a crucial first-step to the success of building confidence and ultimately overcoming the disease it’s designed to ward off. Educating the public about how it was made, the science of how it works, possible side effects and the potential it has to positively impact day-to-day life builds confidence in a vaccine. And confidence leads to more people getting vaccinated, which ultimately leads to controlling the disease.

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That’s why having visible people like Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, the scientific lead of the coronavirus vaccines team at the National Institutes of Health who worked with Moderna to develop its coronavirus vaccine that’s slated for FDA approval, and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, the co-chairwoman of President-elect Joe Biden’s Advisory Board on Coronavirus, is so important.
[ READ: COVID Burden on Black Americans Creates Vaccine Quandary ]
During a town hall hosted Thursday by the NAACP, Corbett said that one of the most important ways that people of color should educate themselves and feel better about the vaccine is by asking candid questions of health care professionals who have taken it about their experience — how it felt, whether it hurt, whether they suffered any side effects.

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“I think as these vaccines are rolling out, getting real-life experiences from people is probably the most important information,” she said.
In hindsight, Corbett adds, naming a vaccine development program “Warp Speed” may be working against the government in terms of getting buy-in from folks who are concerned with how quickly the vaccines are being developed and approved for emergency use authorization. In reality, the type of research that fueled many of the vaccinations coming to market has been ongoing for years, she says.

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“Over the last six years we’ve been studying how to make the best and safe immune response to coronaviruses,” said Corbett. “There were all eyes on deck just as there were all hands on deck. I want people to