Over the past few months, you've probably heard a lot about the Tuskegee Experiment. In the nineteen thirties, researchers began a study of six hundred black men with syphilis. Scientists told them they were being treated for quote, bad blood. That was not the truth. They wanted to study what would happen if syphilis went untreated. The study ran for forty years, the men never received the proper treatment to
cure their illness. Or you might also know the story of Henrietta A. Lax, a Black woman who underwent cancer treatment in the nineteen fifties in a segregated hospital. She died, but researchers cloned her cancer cells. These cells became the first immortalized human cell line and lead to countless medical breakthrough But Lax did not consent to this, and while drug manufacturers profit off of them, her family had no
idea and continued to live in poverty for decades. Or maybe you've heard about Jay Mary and Simms, the so called father of modern guide incology. He experimented on enslaved black women without anesthesia. There was a statue of him in Central Park until over the past year, these events have become a sort of shorthand for why some Black people don't trust the COVID vaccines, And of course this legacy of abuse is part of the reason for that mistrust.
You come to this point in life and you still have some of that that trauma that you've you've you've held on to the residue from the oral stories that have been passed down generationally to your own experiences. That's Dr Timothy Sloan. He's the head pastor at the Luke
a Baptist Church in Humble, Texas. Now, when you talk about UM the vaccine, there's the reminder of the trauma that was experienced through UM the Tuskegee experiment, and you hear the conversations that, um, we need more African Americans to be tested UM to get more data for the vaccine than that automatically triggers some mistrust. But high profile abuses like the Tuskey Experiment don't fully explain why the black community is so suspicious of the medical establishment. Dr
Sloan says, there's a lot more to it. So when we talk about the mistrust, I'm a descendant from the family of of Briggs. Briggs versus Elliott was the first case tried dealing with school to segregation in some No, South Carolina. In Briggs versus Elliott, was the precursor to Brown versus Board of Education, the landmark case in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregating schools was unconstitutional. The case was tried in Charleston, South Carolina, not far from
my grandmother's house. Their good marshal tried the case, and so, of course we didn't win that case. That's when they went on though towards Brown Versusport of Education. The case was eventually appealed and then combined with Brown versus Board of Education. Brown would succeed where Briggs had originally failed and paved the way for Dr Sloan to be the first person in his family to go to a desegregated school. Then Dr Sloan told me about another piece of his
family history. My grandfather was murdered in tarl So, South Carolina by a white mob and he was drowned there off the seashore. Dr Sloan says that his grandmother got a knock on the door and someone said her husband had drowned, without giving a reason why or explaining how it had happened. They just said he drowned, But everyone in this town knew what happened, saw it happen there that night. Dr Sloan's family history isn't a diversion. It's the point. If you are black in America, there are
just more reasons to be on the defensive. Your school may not want you to get an education, your doctors might want to use you as elaborate, and one day your loved one just might disappear without any explanation. How could you not be suspicious of all of the systems and forces that influence your life. Old stories that trickle down, They come with a sense of of guards, uptype mentality in your way of life. I've talked before in this series about how vaccines require trust in order to work.
Right now, the medical establishment is asking the Black community to trust them, and that's a big ask. Medical racism isn't just a historical fact, it's a present day reality. Black women are three times more likely than white women to die because of pregnancy. Half of the number of black people receive mental health services. Black Americans have the highest mortality rate for cancer compared to every other racial group. In this episode, I've made the choice to talk mainly
about the Black community. Every community's relationship to healthcare and vaccines is different, and we could probably spend an entire episode on each of them. Polling has also shown significant hesitancy among Hispanic people and people who live in rural areas. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say they won't get the vaccine at all. Of course, every individual has their own experience too. No community is a monolith, but Black Americans have died at twice the rate of
wide Americans from the virus. So while there may be trust issues with the vaccine and communities of color, they're also the communities that need vaccines the most. The medical establishments need to earn back some of that trust is a matter of life and death, and if they succeed, it could offer crucial insights into how to get other skeptical groups to get the shot as well. I'm Bloomberg News health reporter Christin B. Brown from the prog News
podcast This is Doubt. M On September twelf Reverend R. F. Skinner founded the St. Luke Missionary Baptist Church in Humble, Texas. Humble is located eighteen miles northeast of Houston, where the Woody Big Thicket meets the coastal plains. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was a small town along a rail line where most residents worked in agriculture or lumber. Eventually oil would be discovered there and the town would boom and bust many times over. Its residents were both
black and white, but they didn't really mix. The black people of Humble were not allowed to attend white churches. St Luke was a black church, but in the story goes, the white residents held a meeting they decided the black churches of Humble were no longer welcome. They told us the next day that there was a vote and we had to move our church, and we had if we would hurry, we could get some land on the other
side of the railroad tracks. As Dr. Sloan tells it, the congregation of St. Luke was asked to move literally across the tracks and landed eventually in an area called Bordersville, and we were there up until the two thousand and ten, when we bought property and moved back into really the center of Humble. For eighty years, St Luke had been cast out of the center of town Dr Sloan came
aboard in two thousand two. Under his leadership, the church bought twenty acres of land in prime Humble, built a brand new, multimillion dollar worship center that could hold a thousand people, and eventually rechristened itself the Luke. This story is central to the church's mythology. The ending is a story of triumph, but it's also yet another story about
people of color being cast aside and treated inequitably. These issues are baked into the identity of the church, and a lot of what we do centers on the challenges and struggles at impact African Americans, and for the last year, those struggles have included whether or not to trust in the COVID vaccines. As a pastor, Dr Sloan is the leader of his five thousand member congregation. He's a trusted voice throughout the pandemic. He had avoided discussing the vaccine
and his sermons. Dr Sloane himself was torn over getting one. I had really been struggling with it, you know, I've been talking about it, trying to figure out if I trust the vaccine. Conversations with my wife. His wife, the first lady of the church is an orthopedic surgeon, you know. We both were wrestling with it. And I started to think, though,
wait a minute. If I have these questions, and I've got access to the information I have access to, and surely the typical member of my congregation has the same questions, then how are we all going to deal with this? And I think one of the big gaps is information in communities. So the church did a survey and found that the congregation was pretty hesitant. In October, only thirty of congregants were comfortable getting vaccinate did And there was
a lot of misinformation floating around. You heard everything from people saying, you know, they're gonna put a microchip in you too, You're gonna grow an extra limb, you know. And I hear people gonna get cancer from this, you know, all kinds of things that were out there, floating from what you you see on social media and um and I was I begun just reading through all that stuff and was thinking, man, that this is just bad information
and our biggest hurdle is information. Here. Dr Sloan's congregation isn't alone in its hesitancy. Different poles paints somewhat varying pictures of vaccine skepticism among Black Americans, but many suggest there is more concern about COVID vaccines among black people than white people. The recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, for example, found black adults say they plan to wait to get the vaccine until more people have taken it. Compared to
white adults. Those numbers are actually a lot better than when the vaccines first began rolling out. All of this skepticism presented a problem for Dr Sloan. It's not enough to just give people the facts. Anyone can pull up government statistics. But in an age where everyone seems to be hawking a different set of facts, it's not just the message that matters, it's also the messenger. And you're going to edit all this right, Yes, yes, this is
I have a producer. You will make you sound lovely and me sound lovely, and everything you tell him, I want him to make me sound like James Earl Jones. All right, this is Dr Stephen Thomas, Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Stephen has been interested in
healthcare since he was a kid. His mom was a nurse and back in the day when nurses kind of look like a nurses, you know, the white star tad I who remember her as a child polishing those shoes, and so that inspired me to be involved in health. Stephen has been researching the issue of inequity and healthcare since before there was widespread acknowledgment that that was even a thing. He wants to understand the context that shapes the attitudes and behaviors of people of color when it
comes to their health. He says, there are a lot of things about how we talk about vaccines that don't inspire trust. This includes the language we used to talk about them. It can be scary, confusing, and sometimes also kind to offensive. So you want to come into my community talking about her immunity, well, I can remember my grandmother telling me at one time White people have thought of us like animals, like herds, like chattel. Why do
you want to come into my community with that? Stephen says that when you're talking about vaccination, you can't divorce it from all of the other health care inequities that can impact people of color. There are hundreds of studies that have demonstrated people of color routinely get access to worse healthcare in America, Black people are more likely to delay care because of cost, they're more likely to have diabetes, and they're more likely to die of heart disease. We've
seen similar disparities play out with vaccination. Black and brown communities have been hit hardest by the pandemic, and yet not every region has chosen to give communities of color more doses of the vaccine. Paiser Family Foundation data shows Black and Hispanic people have consistently received fewer vaccines compared
to their share of cases and deaths. And when inoculation sites have been set up to give underserved or minority populations better access to shots, sometimes wealthier suburban nights have just driven over to get shots there themselves. This is really frustrating for people like Stephen. It's clear that there is a concerted effort to make an overture to the
black community. When they announced the Phase three clinical trials for the Maderna vaccine, the National Institutes of Health put out a Q and A which featured a black trial participant talking about why it was important black people to take part in the trial. I had questions that about what it would be like, about how it impact on me and so I'm here today to help others decide whether or not they want to volunteer to participate in
clinical trials. I have to say, the mayor of Tuski, Alabama, televised getting his own COVID shot, so did Kamala Harris, our first Black Asian and female VP. But lack of access it just reinforces existing mistrust. And that doesn't just mean having shots available. It also means making sure everyone is able to figure out how to sign up for an appointment. Don't put systems in place that you say are okay, well, everybody has can get online and sign up.
But I know a whole bunch of people who look like me who don't have stable internet, still on flip bones and can sit around refreshing, refreshing, refreshing. You get me. So these built in inequalities really exacerbate the institutional racism we've been living with Over and over again. In reporting the series, I've heard from people that they feel dismissed or that their concerns about vaccines weren't taken seriously. That's
a big problem across the board. It's hard to trust anyone who treats you like your stupid or your concerns don't matter. Inequities make all of this worse. Hesitant doesn't mean no, it means let's talk and don't rush over me. This moment is a critical one, and there are forces conspiring to really try and screw it up. Anti vaccine figureheads like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Have been targeting the
black community. In March, Kennedy put out a documentary called Medical Racism, clearly aimed at recruiting more people of color to the cause, but honestly a botched rollout of the vaccines in which the people who need them the most can't get them. That stands to threaten the trust of the black community as much as anything else. It's hard to trust a system that doesn't seem to prioritize or
care about people that look like you. Those inequality issues desperately need to be addressed better, But efforts to gain the trust to the black community do seem to be making an impact, and those efforts just might tell us something useful about how to inspire trust in vaccines in other communities. Stephen says, we know plenty about why people of color distrust health care systems. He says, what we
need now or solutions. The idea for one of those solutions came to him over twenty years ago when he was getting a haircut. I'll change his name to protect him, all right, Joe walks in, and you have to understand. And a black barbershop, you have TVs on every wall, all to a different shan and the music explaining, and everybody's talking. So Joe comes in, Hey, Joe, where you been? He said he was in the emergency room. He pulls
out these pills. He said, the doctor told me I'm gonna have to take these pills the rest of my life. In the barber set, Joe, you know, if you take those pills, you won't be able to keep up your obligations. And everybody heard that. I don't have to explain to you what that means obligations. I'm going to assume you know what he means when he says obligations. I looked at Joe's face. He's not going to take those pills. His doctor has no idea. There's somebody in the community
with this level of influence. Now Jone has been in the hospital. E er, you just counting up the cross diagnosed prescribed a medication, got the prescription field walks and took on barber's up and not going to take those pills anymore. And they not want to go back to the doctor because he hasn't been following the doctor's orders. This got Stephen thinking, it's easy to avoid the doctors,
but not so much a barber. Not if you want to look good anyway, no self respect and black barber whatever is say, I'll get you in and out in the fifteen minutes. Okay, there ain't no super cuts, no hair cutler, ain't none of that. You're going to spend have a day in the barbershop just catching the po thing. Some people come in and they don't even need a haircut. So in many ways it's a sacred space. And this put an idea in Steven's mind. Whatever the barber was
a partner. What if the barber said, hey, Joe, you know, if you're having side effects, you know, a rectile dysfunction, don't be ashamed, tell your doctor you can change the medication. In other words, Stephen wanted the barber and the doctors to team up. He wondered what would happen if health advice wasn't only coming from doctors, but also from a trusted member of the community. So in two thousand one, Stephen started what would become HAIR, the Health Advocates in
Reach and Research campaign. Through HAIR, he trains local barbers and beauticians in Maryland to offer good health advice to the community and advocate for things like collorrectal screenings. During the pandemic. Stephen has mobilized this network to disseminate accurate COVID information, including about the vaccines. Stephen believes that in order to get past the mistrust, you have to do the work to build trust, and that requires meeting people
where they are. It requires listening to them, and it requires acknowledging the missteps of the past and the inequalities that persist today. I don't like to have to throw tuskee in your face in an order for you to understand that black lives matter, and they don't have to be marching in street the matter. They may be in a hospital that matters too. With that one word, think of what I'm saying to you that these institutions have me history of abuse in the name, but I'm here
to help you in the name of science. Now you want me to trust this science this is a legitimate distrust and our efforts should be then to rebuild trust and then and be trustworthy. At the end of the day, even your favorite celebrity probably isn't as convincing as someone you know, like your aunt, or your barber or your reverend. Back in Humble, Texas, Dr Sloan was struggling with what
message to send his congregation about the vaccine. The pastor still had a lot of questions by the time vaccines were starting to roll out. He began thinking about what kind of trusted expert the church could turn to for answers. I thought to myself, why not asked the top dot in the nation? And you know the words he can say is no. And you know if he doesn't respond,
nobody knows us in the letter but me. So he sent an email to the office of Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. A week later, Dr Sloan got a response. Fauci was in on January six, the same day that pro Trump extremists stormed the Capitol. They taped an interview. It would air that Sunday as part of the day's worship Service.
Dr Sloan says that going into that interview, he was still feeling pretty conflicted about the shot, but there was one moment in which he started to change his mind.
First of all, I think we need to acknowledge that the concern and the hesitation based on what you refer to UH as you know, the slights and the mistreatment of the African American community historically by the established government medical establishment is real in history and we have to recognize that it occurred, and we have to emphasize that UH situations have been put in place, UH safeguards have been put in place that this could never happen again.
When he did that, I felt like for the thousands of people who were watching, guards automatically went down and there was there was a receptiveness towards what he was saying. And after listening to him, after hearing the thoroughness, after hearing the different things explained in Layman's terms, um I concluded that conversation with confidence in taking the vaccine. This because back to a lot of what we talked about earlier, people and especially black people who have been screwed over
time and time again. I want to be acknowledged and heard vout she was putting all of this into practice, and I think that's what many people want. They want to know that that what I feel is legitimate, and he legitimized a lot of the pain and trauma of African Americans. And so we were like, okay, all right, So here's someone who really understands where we're coming from. And I felt that way, Okay, you understand where I'm coming from with these questions. So the interview plays as
part of the Sunday service. After it ends, it's time for Dr. Sloan to give his sermon. Dr Sloan says that initially he felt uneasy telling his congregation to go and get vaccinated outright, even though his own concerns had dissipated. This is something I've heard from other leaders of Black churches in reporting this. A lot of them say that they want to give their congregance good information about the vaccines, but they don't want to go so far as to
tell them they should get it. Many have told me that would risk compromising the trust their congregations have in them. They don't want to appear as if they're on the side of corporations or the government. Instead, of their community. I wanted to offer to people, you know, hey, take this information and make the best decision. So the reverend takes the stage after the interview plays. He's wearing a crisp black suit and light pink tie. He has thick
black frame glasses on. He starts with a story about lepers in the Book of Second Kings, chapter seven, beginning at verse three, the word of God is recorded. The story goes that there were four lepers standing outside a city gate. The city is suffering from famine, and the lepers are trying to figure out what to do with themselves. So they said to each other, why should we stay here until we die? If we say we'll go into the city, well, the famine is there and we will die.
And if we stay here, we will die. So let's go over into the camp or the Ramians and surrender. Doctor Sloan then goes on to say that he's telling the story because it's about people making decisions together, and then suddenly he switches gears from the Old Testament to today. I don't need to tell you how startling the statistics are today. There've been over ninety one million cases of
COVID worldwide. One point nine three mill in deaths, twenty two point seven million cases and three hundred eighty one thousand deaths in the United States alone, and those numbers are still rising as we speak. And while these numbers are alarming, there even worse for African Americans. As his sermon unfolds, he discusses Tuskegee and why it's understandable for black people to be suspicious of the vaccine, and then he makes a link between the lepers and the Black community.
Challenges are nothing new to us, but we've always been reminded that overcoming obstacles is going to require an undaunted faith in God. And that's why we can so easily identify with these lepers in this text. We share similar realities. We know what it's like to be ostracized because of your skin color. We also know what it's like to be written off by others, but use God. He again lays out the options the lepers had go into the city and die, stay at the gate and die, or
go to the camp and possibly live. At this point, he does something he wasn't planning on. He takes a stand on the vaccine. We try to go back to normal without the vaccine. Handcuffed by the traumatic past that's been inflicted upon us, we'll die. If we stay here and just hope things will get better and it'll magically disappear, then we'll die. But if we take the vaccine, we live. Dr Sloan's plans had changed mid sermon. It wasn't enough for him to tell his congregation to just try and
find the best information about vaccines. He decided to trust and he died his congregation to do the same. And so I get home and my wife goes, so, I guess you just told everybody to take the vaccine. Huh. And I said, well, I guess I did you know? And I think that is what I really didn't want to accomplish. I wanted to let them know how much confidence I have in it. And I think it's it's it's pivotal for us. Doctor Sloan went even further. In February. He put out a video that was basically a p
s A for vaccination. Vuci's message to the community was important, but it carried even more weight when endorsed by a trusted church leader. There's evidence the efforts like this are
paying off in the black community. A lot of faith leaders have spoken out if pastors and faith leaders just simply continue to waffle about it and not and not choose one side of the other, then you're gonna leave still a lot of people out there who are still sifting through the information with maybe some difficulty and actually really comprehending it and never really making, you know, a proper decision. So I felt like I need to tell you where I stand and what I think is is
important for us. But just like my sermons you know every Sunday pre vaccine. You know, listen, you can take it to leave it something. You might not like it, but here it is, is what I believe. Dr Sloan has heard from his congregants that Fauci's talk really made a difference for them. I spoke to one of them, Bloody Coverson, a retired teacher in her sixties who was also a deacon at the Luke. One day I would say, I'm gonna take it, and the next day I was like, no,
I wouldn't think about it for a while. That's what I'm gonna take it. I'm gonna take The pandemic has been rough for Letty. She feels lonely often and isolated. She wants to hug her grandkids and also to stop having to explain to them why they can't hug. But as much as Letty wants the pandemic to be over, she also had lots of concerns about the vaccine. Bloody says she first started to really question whether she wanted
to get the shot once vaccines were rolling out. I started thinking about it when it became a reality that it was going to happen. That's when I started thinking about it. But it was also that in the back of my head, why so fast? How can this be done so fast? And I began to think about in the back of my head the health and equities, um, all the things that go alonge was maybe being a black female in the history of it. Bloody actually had
a health scare herself when she was ten. She had the measles, but white doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with her and wanted to perform exploratory surgery. I haven't remember the words today, and they said if you take her from this hospital or she would die. But my mom said, no, I'm taking her for a second opinion, and she did it, and the doctor who gave us. The second opinion say it straight up if they had
operated on her, and they would have killed her. In the end, it turned out she didn't need surgery, She just needed a few days to recover. The doctors had almost opened her up for no reason. Bloody had been put in danger by doctors in the past, so now she wondered, why trust them, remembering that experience that I had when I was keen, and that's still there. So she just kept going back and forth, deciding to take
it and then deciding not to. And then she heard the Sunday sermon with Fouci Like Dr Sloan, it really stood out to her that he recognized what the black community has been through, and he talked about other medical issues that are generational, some of them um diabetes, blood pressure hard and it's because of the inequities, and it's also because of the jobs that we have. And I want people to really understand and hone in on why why it is happening to us more often, and it's
not our fault. It's not our fault. So Leotty got vaccinated. She's had both her shots, and she says she felt a little fear before she did it, but she did it anyway, and then she went home and told her family about it, many of whom had also been hesitant to take the vaccine. One of her sons actually went to Tuskegee University for college, and she told me he was afraid of going to the clinic there. The Syphilist study loomed over it. And if I got my vaccine,
my son didn't want to. My husband, Yes, my daughter's going to get her some My oldest son and his wife had COVID, so they have to wait. They they are going to take the vaccine. This gets what Stephen Thomas was talking about. Even if your barber isn't an mp D, you might trust his advice more than your doctor. Or in this case, you might trust your mom, who trusted her reverend, who in turn decided to trust a healthcare official who took the time I'm to listen and
address community concerns. A lot of work went into convincing Letty to get vaccinated, but it paid off. She even blogged about it. I want to say I did it, and I'm still here and nothing adverse has happened. And I used this analogy about Peter in the boat, and he asked Jesus, can I come, And Jesus said, get out the boat. And Peter was the only one to get out the boat to come to Jesus. But then doubt came across and and he fear, and he began, he began to drown. But I tell the people I
talked to, I'm getting out the boat. I'm getting at the boat. Letty got out of the boat, she got her shot. The majority of Americans are facing this very same choice for the first time as vaccines become available to everyone. In the series, we've shown how mistrust and misinformation conspire to make people hesitant and how some people are working to solve that problem. On the series finale of Doubt, we'll take a look at where things stand and if enough people are getting vaccinated that we can
finally go back to normal. Doubt is written and reported by me Kristin V. Brown To for Foreheads is our senior producer. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Our theme was composed and performed by Hannis Brown. Special thanks to Bloomberg editors Tim Annette and Rick Shine. Francesco Levi is the head of Bloomberg Podcast. Be sure to subscribe to prognosis. If you haven't already, and if you like our show, please leave us A review helps others find out about
the show. Thanks for listening, See you next time.