COVID-19 Vaccine Embraced By Black And Latinx Americans : Shots

Dr. Hansel Tookes made sure his first dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami on Dec. 15. was televised, as a way to combat hesitancy.

Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP via Getty Images

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Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP via Getty Images

Dr. Hansel Tookes made sure his first dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami on Dec. 15. was televised, as a way to combat hesitancy.

Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP via Getty Images

When COVID-19 vaccines began arriving in Memphis, Tenn., late last year, some Black residents had questions. Did the vaccines cause infertility? Did they alter a person’s DNA?

They don’t. And local community leaders worked hard to counter these and other vaccine myths as they came up in public forums around town or appeared online.

Even so, Dr. Pat Flynn, an infectious disease specialist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, was worried that early public vaccination events might be dominated by white people in a town where most residents are Black.

“I was surprised that it was an extremely mixed population, representative of our community, who was coming through to get vaccines,” she says.

What Flynn observed in Memphis reflects a national shift in what’s often called vaccine hesitancy.

In late 2020, national surveys found that Black and Hispanic respondents were less likely than white respondents to say they planned to get a vaccine. Surveys done in the past month suggest that gap has diminished or disappeared.

Flynn, who was involved in testing Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine, has seen attitudes among health care workers, many of whom are Black, at her own institution change over the past few months.

“We kind of looked at it and thought, surely, everybody will want to get a vaccine,” she says. “But initially, our uptake was not as high as we thought it would be.”

Since then, vaccination rates at the hospital have been rising steadily.

“There were some people that were kind of delaying to see what happened when everybody else got a vaccine,” She says. “Now they’re stepping forward to roll up their sleeve.”

Latinx communities appear to be embracing not only COVID-19 vaccines, but seasonal flu shots, says Dolores Albarracín, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Data from the 2019 flu season found a vaccination rate of 38% among Hispanic Americans, compared with 53% among white Americans, she says. In the current flu season, she says, “Hispanics are actually vaccinating at a higher rate than are whites.”

Hispanic Americans are still a bit less likely than white Americans to say they have received, or plan to…