Local health officials are concerned that some members of the Black community are hesitant to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
Laura Reed is a Certified Nurse Practitioner at Mercy Health in Springfield. At a United Black Community Coalition meeting on Wednesday, Reed said that some of this hesitancy comes from the history of unethical medical experiments that were performed on certain cultural groups.
“A lot of times people are worried because minority groups in the past were always used for treatment experiments," she said. "And I think some people, they hear that carried on from their parents and they carry it on down.”
Dr. Yamini Teegala is the Chief Medical Officer at Rocking Horse Community Medical Center in Clark County. Teegala says one way to help build trust in the vaccine is to act as a role model for others in your community.
“You can get the vaccine and tell people ‘if you trust me then you might have to trust what I did,’ she said. "It is relationship-based advocacy. We need to advocate for our own communities.”
A Kaiser Family Foundation study released in early February shows that although twelve percent of Ohio’s population is Black, Black individuals only account for seven percent of the COVID vaccines that have been administered.