Lingering Mistrust From Tuskegee Syphilis Study Connected to COVID-19 Vaccine Reluctance

A new study led by Xiaolong Hou, a graduate student at the University of Georgia, has examined the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines among Black and White communities across the United States in an effort to further analyze health disparities between the two populations. The pandemic disproportionately impacted the African American community, who experienced more exposure, illness, and death from the virus than other groups. Hou and his co-authors from Texas A&M University and AirBnB used data from the United States Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 tracker to compare the change in vaccine rates among Black Americans across the country. The results found that Black people living within 750 miles of Tuskegee, Alabama, were slower to receive the COVID-19 vaccine than their White neighbors, as well as Black Americans in other areas of the country. The authors suggest this phenomenon is due to the lingering mistrust of public health services among African Americans as a result of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that started in the 1930s. The study involved a sample of 600 Black men with and without syphilis whose informed consent to participate in the study was never collected. Some of the men were...