Why a Boston church got Anthony Fauci to speak to its congregation - Boston.com

Despite the recent promising news about a COVID-19 vaccine, a growing body of evidence has found that the drug faces high levels of distrust among Black and Latino populations — the same communities that have been hit hardest by the pandemic

Anthony Fauci

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, addressed Roxbury Presbyterian Church in a Zoom meeting last week, urging the mostly Black congregation to have confidence in the independent and scientifically rigorous vaccine development process

“Don’t deprive yourself of the advantage of an extraordinarily important advance in science by not getting vaccinated,” he said

Communities of color have disproportionately suffered from COVID-19 infections and death primarily due to both deep-rooted socioeconomic inequities, often known as social determinants of health, and higher rates of certain chronic diseases that make individuals more vulnerable to the disease

A recent study found that Black and Latino residents in Boston were far more likely to be exposed to COVID-19 due to disparities commuting to work, accessing food, using public transit, and exercising, as The Boston Globe reported last week

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black and Latino individuals are 2.8 times more likely to die from COVID-19 compared to non-Hispanic white individuals

At the same time, polls have shown those same communities are the most hesitant about a COVID-19 vaccine, which officials hope to begin distributing over the course of the coming months and make widely available around next spring

A survey released last Monday found that 52 percent of Black respondents, as well as 34 percent of Latino respondents, said they would either definitely or probably not get the vaccine, due to concerns about its safety and effectiveness

Liz Walker, the senior pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church and a former WBZ anchor, told WBUR that she reached out to Fauci after seeing high levels of hesitancy about the vaccine in her own community

“I was really surprised at how many parishioners, how many people, not just in the church, but in the community, said they weren’t going to take the vaccine,” Walker said

Among members of the Black community, distrust in government and racial identity was particularly linked to vaccine skepticism, according to the recent survey — and not for no reason

For example, they found that knowledge of the federal government’s infamous Tuskegee experiment from 1932 to 1972, in which a group of Black men in Alabama who had syphilis were not told about it or treated for it so that researchers could study the disease, was associated with increased vaccine hesitancy

Distrust in President Donald Trump’s administration and the perception that the vaccine development is being rushed has only fanned those flames

“It’s ironic, but the very reason that we feel we’re getting sicker [with COVID-19] is because we feel we haven’t been properly dealt with in the health care arena,” Walker told WBUR

“Now, you add to that the political situation, so you have a perfect storm of problems in my community of wanting to take this vaccine.”

Walker said during the meeting, which was posted online Tuesday, that they had more than 2,000 people register for the virtual event with Fauci

However, he stressed that the approval of COVID-19 vaccines has been conducted separately from partisan officials or pharmaceutical companies in a multi-level, independent process overseen by “career scientists, not politicians.”

“What you’re having is both independence and transparency, and at the end of the day, all of those data become public because they will be published in peer-reviewed journals,” Fauci said of the recent trials that have found three different vaccines to be at least 90 percent effective

“Number two, the speed with which it’s been done does not compromise safety, nor does it compromise scientific integrity,” Fauci said

Still, the efficacy of the vaccine doesn’t matter if individuals don’t get it

And given how hard hit communities of color have been, Fauci said it is especially important for many people to get vaccinated to create community immunity

“If you have a highly effective vaccine and the overwhelming majority of people get vaccinated, we can crush this outbreak,” he said

The vaccine distribution plan submitted by Massachusetts also puts a specific focus on “critical populations” and includes a public awareness campaign to address skepticism

Amid evidence that the vaccine trials have been slow to recruit minorities, Fauci said that he’s hoping to encourage people of color to volunteer so that officials “can look our African American and our Latinx colleagues in the eye and say, ‘We’ve proven that it is not only safe and effective in whites, it’s safe and effective in you and your community.'” So far, Fauci said there haven’t been “any severe adverse events” due to the COVID-19 vaccines

Fauci noted that the United States has recorded between 1,000 and 2,000 deaths a day due to COVID-19 over the past month, even if fatality rates had fallen compared to the spring

Already, he noted, more than a quarter of a million people have died from the disease

“We’re getting younger people getting infected,” Fauci said

“We’re also doing better at taking care of people

Let more people get infected.’ If we don’t stop this outbreak, we will have an extraordinarily large number of deaths

That’s the reason why vaccines are so important.”