A new study led by Xiaolong Hou, a graduate student at the University of Georgia, has examined the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines among Black and White communities across the United States in an effort to further analyze health disparities between the two populations. The pandemic disproportionately impacted the African American community, who experienced more exposure, illness, and death from the virus than other groups.
Hou and his co-authors from Texas A&M University and AirBnB used data from the United States Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 tracker to compare the change in vaccine rates among Black Americans across the country. The results found that Black people living within 750 miles of Tuskegee, Alabama, were slower to receive the COVID-19 vaccine than their White neighbors, as well as Black Americans in other areas of the country.
The authors suggest this phenomenon is due to the lingering mistrust of public health services among African Americans as a result of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that started in the 1930s. The study involved a sample of 600 Black men with and without syphilis whose informed consent to participate in the study was never collected. Some of the men were treated with a placebo so researchers could track the progression of the disease. The study continued until the early 1970s. During this time, penicillin was becoming widely available as a treatment for the disease.
The authors stress that policymakers and public health leaders need to take historical context into consideration when making efforts to minimize health disparities in the United States. The research team suggests developing individualized community-based interventions that are tailored specifically to the needs of the Black community.
