COVID-19 and Minorities: A Historical Trust Gap
By: Martina Aucejo
After months of living in a hellish world filled with more masks, hand sanitizer, and empty shelves in grocery stores than ever before, it seems as if the end of COVID-19 is finally in sight. Several countries such as New Zealand and Australia are Covid free, and countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom have finally gained access to life-saving vaccines. However, not everyone is exactly running with open arms to get vaccinated.
Large percentages of ethnic and racial minority groups in the U.S have expressed concern and distrust towards getting a Covid vaccine. When asked about the effectiveness and safeness of a Covid vaccine, only 18 percent of Black people said that they thought the vaccine would be effective, with even less saying that they thought the vaccine was safe (14 percent). For Latinos, the percentages are around double that of African Americans, but still don’t hit above the 50 percent mark. In other words, less than half of Latinos and less than one fourth of Black Americans trust and believe in the effectiveness of the Covid vaccine.
Ironically, the Black and Latino communities are among some of the most devastated from the pandemic, with Black Americans and Latinos being almost 3 times as likely as White Americans to die from the disease and both being around 4 times as likely as White Americans to be hospitalized. So, if Blacks and Latinos are being disproportionately affected by Covid, why is it that the majority of them disapprove of a vaccine that’ll help them against the disease?
This question can be answered by looking historically at minorities and the trust gap they have with medical systems. In a study done by L. Ebony Boulware, Lisa A. Cooper, Lloyd E. Ratner, Thomas A. LaVeist, and Neil R. Powe, called Race and Trust in the Health Care System, it was concluded that Black Americans have significantly less trust in their physicians and in hospitals compared to White Americans, due to racial discrimination faced in medical research and the health care system. The most notable example of this discrimination was the Tuskegee syphilis study, where 600 African men were deceived into participating in a study from 1932 to 1972 by researchers who hid factual information about the experiment from the men in order to get their consent to participate. Furthermore, when penicillin emerged in 1947, the researchers never informed the Black men of this treatment, despite the penicillin emerging as an effective treatment to syphilis. Ultimately, the subjects never got a treatment for syphilis during their study, and were never given the opportunity to quit the study. While lawsuits and benefit programs did emerge from and for those who were affected by the study, it clearly wasn’t enough to erase the effect of the study on African Americans as a community, even decades later.
For Hispanics/Latinos, the mistrust comes from somewhere a bit different. Interestingly enough, Latinos are the ethnic/racial group that is least likely to go to a doctor. In a paper called Patients' Race, Ethnicity, Language, and Trust in a Physician by Irena Stepanikova, Stefanie Mollborn, Karen S. Cook, David H. Thom and Roderick M. Kramer, it has been found that language barriers contribute to distrust between a physician and their patient, particularly among Latinos. When subjects were asked whether they had “a great deal” of trust in their physicians, 71 percent of non-Hispanic Whites said yes, whereas only 61 percent of primarily English speaking Hispanics said yes, and only 56 percent of primarily Spanish speaking Hispanics said yes– only a slight majority. Lots of Hispanics are feeling a sense of a disconnect between them and their doctors due to these language barriers, and also because of the fact that they aren’t being treated by people that are like them ethnically and racially. In fact, in both African Americans and Hispanics there is distrust towards the healthcare system, partially due to the lack of African Americans and Hispanics working within it.
It is time to step up– it is unacceptable that there are people who are distrustful of a system that solely exists to help them as well as others. In 2020, we’ve realized that there’s a lot of fixing that needs to be done– our healthcare system and institutionalized discrimination not being an exception to that rule. I encourage you all to speak up and out against any wrong you may see and to work to connect with others, despite our boundaries and differences. It is vital that we build trust and connections in one another, in order to work towards building them in our institutions.
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