If a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 is freely available, less than half of Black individuals surveyed and two-thirds of Latino individuals surveyed said they would get it, the Washington Post reported.
The survey, conducted by the COVID Collaborative, asked 1,050 Black and 258 Latino adults about their views of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. According to the survey results, 14 percent of Black Americans and 34 percent of Latino Americans trusted that a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine would be safe and 18 percent of Black Americans and 40 percent of Latino Americans trusted that it would be effective.
"It's not having a vaccine that saves lives, it's people actually getting vaccinated," Michelle Williams from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-founder of the COVID Collaborative tells the Post. "For that to happen, we need to understand why so many are hesitant and help overcome that."
The survey also delved into the whys of vaccine hesitancy and found that among Black Americans it could in part be traced to historical wrongs, as knowledge of the Tuskegee Syphilis study was associated with being less likely to get a vaccine. The findings also suggest messengers from the Black community would be trusted more than white messengers. "And very clearly, personal physicians from minority communities are going to be very important in this effort," Williams adds at the Post.