Catherine TRIOMPHE
With a sizable Black minority traditionally mistrustful of vaccines and with many conservative rural whites convinced that the vaccine is more dangerous than Covid-19 itself, Southern US states like Alabama have some of the country’s lowest vaccination rates, leaving the disadvantaged region vulnerable to dangerous new virus variants. But some people are trying their best to change that.
With a small team and an energy level that belies the crushing Southern heat, county commissioner Sheila Tyson knocks on the doors of modest homes in Memorial Park, a mainly Black neighbourhood of Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city.
“This Sunday, I want you all out there (in the park)’’, Tyson, a leader of the Alabama Black Women’s Roundtable, tells anyone who opens their door.
“We will have free food as long as it lasts, when it’s gone it’s gone, and we are going to have vaccine shots — have you had your vaccines?”
Despite an injured foot, Tyson is one of the few local officials to actively campaign for vaccine acceptance, tirelessly visiting parks, schools, day-care centres and stadiums in some of the area’s poorest neighbourhoods.
When Covid cases spiked in Alabama in December and January, people were “dropping like flies’’, she says.
And as the Delta variant of coronavirus spreads across the United States, she says, “We are very concerned, not only about the Black and brown people but about all people.”
Tyson has heard the conspiracy theories that keep some people from getting the vaccine, including the notion that “the vaccine would sterilise African American men.”
Such baseless ideas stem from a grim history of discriminatory healthcare practices — not least the infamous syphilis experiments carried out by the US government from 1932 to 1972 on hundreds of unwitting Black men in Tuskegee, 200 km from Birmingham.
— AFP
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