Blood is Sicker than Pfizer?
A dear friend of mine, told me recently, how she went into a shop in Dalston East London, recently where an elderly black woman announced that she’d just had her anti-covid, jab. The whole shop erupted against her for taking what they saw, as this dangerous health step. I can also reveal that members of my own family are against having the jab (I seem to be the exception and I urge everyone, to book their appointments, if they haven’t done so already).
I want to stress that the people in neither the shop, nor my family are being totally irrational or superstitious. It’s a fact that, unfortunately in both here the UK and the USA, the take up of getting the jab, has been relatively low, and I want to try and explore the historical context of why that might be so. I also want to stress, that this is by no means an endorsement of the anti-lockdown conspiraloons such as Spiked, Laurence Fox, Caroline Malone, Julia Hartley-Brewer, etc.
A UCL/ CEPEO / LSE COVID-19 survey around March 17th 2021, showed that a third of young black people have doubts about taking the vaccine, with hesitancy that is significantly higher among non-White respondents. Patrick Sturgis (LSE), Lindsey Macmillan, Jake Anders and Gill Wyness (UCL Institute of Education), writing in the LSE, noted “However, as can be seen in the chart below, there were substantial differences in vaccine hesitancy between ethnic groups. Black young people are considerably more hesitant about getting the vaccine than other ethnic groups, with nearly two thirds (64%) expressing hesitancy compared to just a quarter (25%) of those who self-identified as White.
Young people who identified as mixed race or Asian expressed levels of hesitancy between these extremes, with a third (33%) of mixed race and 39% of Asian young people expressing vaccine hesitancy”[1]
We know that Covid-19 has been a highlight of the inequalities that those of us, on the left, have been pointing to for years. One way in which this has been shown is in the racial division, (in light of the false claim of the Sewell Report, the idea that there is no “institutional racism’, this is doubly insulting) when it comes to health and the NHS.
By April 2021, only 64% of black over-50s in the UK had been vaccinated compared with 93% of white people of the same age. The reasons for this are complex of course but unethical medical treatment in the past. Ongoing discrimination and personal experiences of insensitive treatment by the NHS have all played a roll. Racists and reactionaries have blamed Muslims and South-East Asians for the creation and spread of Covid. So perhaps it is not surprising that black communities are afraid of in turn being blamed.
Heather Nelson, chief executive of the Black Health Initiative, has said this blame has resulted in her charity receiving abusive calls and emails, some using the most offensive racial slurs targeted at black people after (false) reports of a local outbreak of coronavirus. “Rather than blaming the black community for not having the vaccines, let’s look at the reasons why,” Ms Nelson remarked that it was important to look at why it was that the black community viewed getting the jab with suspicion.
Adding to the distrust however has been ‘that old, time religion’ in the African Christian community, with a number of evangelical priests using the pulpit, to denounce getting the jab.
Sky News on April 21st reported “Office of National Statistics (ONS) figures from 17 February to 14 March suggest that 22% of black adults in the UK reported coronavirus vaccine hesitancy, down from 44% the previous month” [2]
A lack of trust is something that comes back time and time again, a point made by the actor and comedian Sir Lenny Henry, in an NHS campaign video, who emphasised this point, saying he knew it was “hard to trust some institutions and authorities”.
Biological and reproductive warfare against ethnic minorities has become part and parcel of imperialism. In the 19th century First Nation people in America, and Canada, were given blankets infected with typhus. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in the US, which ran for nearly 40 years (1932–1972), actually involved withholding treatment from hundreds of men, despite penicillin being available, and this resulted in many preventable deaths.
Winston Morgan, writing for Wired on December 20th 2020, noted, “There are a number of structural reasons why BAME groups are more likely to encounter the virus. They are more likely to live in densely populated locations and in housing where multiple generations share the same space. To compound the exposure risk, a disproportionate number are employed in public facing roles such as bus and taxi drivers, on the frontline in the NHS and various care home roles. The structural problems highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic have not disappeared and could be exacerbated with the roll-out of the vaccine”[3]
What is also very worrying is that the government, through the minister for equalities Kemi Badenoch, has been quick to dismiss the role of structural racism in medical outcomes from COVID-19. [4]
For our cousins across the pond, the situation is just as dire, with a health system driven by profit and credit status. Race is a social construct, not a medical condition and so with that in mind, it is also important to keep in mind that it is also linked to socioeconomic status. The lack of access that African-Americans face to healthcare, housing, education and opportunity is caused by racial injustice, not race. When the pandemic became publicly acknowledged in the USA, social media circulated the myth that black people were immune to Covid-19, as Brentin Mock in Bloomberg noted on March 14th 2020.
Such memes and gifs on social media, WhatsApp chat groups, etc, has fed into the racial othering of African-Americans. Then when virus started to really ravage the population, the flip side was that far from being immune, black people were the predisposed to it, due to ‘genetics.
In America, the relatively low take up of having the jab can also be put down to the manner in which class plays out. Vicente Navarro, on March 9th 2021 in p9 of his report, ‘What is Happening in the United States? How Social Classes Influence the Political Life of the Country and its Health and Quality of Life’ says “Half of the US population, however, could not be quarantined at home. Because of the manual nature of their work and its essential character (needed for the immediate survival and continuity of society), they were forced to keep working.
Moreover, because of their very limited job stability (many were women with precarious work) and very limited labor stability and social protection, they needed to work; many voted for Trump because he prioritized the running of the economy and the production of jobs above everything else”[5]
Donald Trump was quite rightly chastised for his depraved indifference and irresponsibility during his overseeing of measures to counter the pandemic. His advocacy of using bleach to counter the virus is but one deadly example, given that a number of people died following his advice.
But it also can’t be denied that despite his mishandling, in the 2020 election, Trump won 8% of the black vote, and that is 2% up above what he received from that community in 2016. Edison Research put the figure as high as between 11–12% voting for Trump and both point to the fact that black men were more likely than black women to vote for Trump.
Despite his public scepticism of how deadly Covid-19 was, Trump caught the virus, but only received the vaccine himself in March 2021, in a manner that was decidedly low key. Many of his supporters were disappointed given his former stance.
With regards to black voters and their reluctance to have the vaccine, during his re-election campaign, Trump changed the emphasis and targets of his racism, and instead continually talked about bringing black unemployment down to pre-pandemic levels, in turn this downplaying of the pandemic and the focus on economic recovery/stability, has made getting vaccinated less important.
Conclusion: If the pandemic means that you have a stark choice between not being furloughed and having to still go into an unsafe environment that nonetheless puts food on the table or having to arrange your schedule around child care, transport to a crowded ER, for a vaccine you’ve heard dire things about, the stark choice, for many is no choice at all.
The ‘stoicism’ of black bodies, the ability to endure gruelling hardship was built into the slave narrative, that carried on after official slavery ended. For example here in the UK Hannah Summers on January 15th 2021, writing in the Guardian found that “Black women are still four times more likely than white women to die in pregnancy or childbirth in the UK, and women from Asian ethnic backgrounds face twice the risk, according to a new report.
The data shows a slight narrowing of the divide–last year’s report found black women were five times more likely to die — but experts say that is statistically insignificant and not a sign of progress.” https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jan/15/black-women-in-the-uk-four-times-more-likely-to-die-in-pregnancy-or-childbirth The BMJ has also come to the same conclusion in it’s own report from January 18th 2021; https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n152
Writing for Women’s Health, Habiba Katsha on January 15th 2021, said in ‘Giving Birth While Black: Why Is It So Much More Fraught With Danger?’ that “Studies show that the amount of melanin in your skin has a bearing on how readily your pain is believed, and as such, your symptoms treated, by the medical establishment. Myths such as that Black people have thicker skin or less sensitive nerve endings have been shown to persist in 40% of medical trainees according to one American survey, while a meta-analysis examining over two decades of studies found that Black patients in the US were 22% less likely to receive pain medication than white people”[6]https://www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/health/a33323338/black-maternal-care
When you also consider the history of slavery, vivisection, dissection, biological and gynaecological experimentation etc. then it is not surprising that the attitudes of many Afro-Caribbeans/Afro-British, African-Americans, ranges from scepticism to outright hostility, when the other factors such as health, housing, jobs and education are also added.
It also cannot be stressed enough that the class dimensions of the pandemic means that in both the UK and USA, it’s not superstition of ignorant natives that is playing a role in the slow uptake of getting vaccinated from the black community. It is more that based upon real life experiences; the state and its institutions have given those communities little reason to trust them on health matters.
[1] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/2021/03/17/almost-two-thirds-of-black-british-young-people-would-be-reluctant-to-get-a-covid-vaccine
[2] https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy-among-black-people-in-uk-halves-new-data-suggests-12262672
[3] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/coronavirus-vaccine-system-racism-uk
[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52913539
[5] ‘Vicente Navarro ‘What is Happening in the United States? How Social Classes Influence the Political Life of the Country and its Health and Quality of Life’ section; The Pandemic and Public Health Crisis Have Accentuated the Class Polarization of the United States’, p9, March 9th 2021. http://www.vnavarro.org/?p=16197&lang=en
[6] Habiba Katsha, January 15th 2021, Giving Birth While Black: Why Is It So Much More Fraught With Danger? Women’s Health, https://www.womenshealthmag.com/uk/health/a33323338/black-maternal-care
