Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

https://mattbruenig.com/2021/08/04/does-the-tuskegee-experiment-really-explain-black-vaccination-rates/

by hncurious • 5 years ago

61 70 5 years ago

I would guess that awareness of the Tuskegee Experiment and black history more generally is greater among those with higher education than those with lower education. If this guess is right, then knowledge of historical racist medical abuses is actually strongly correlated with getting the vaccine.

This correlation appears meaningless in light of the previous paragraph.

As with the population in general and every other racial group, black vaccination rates climb in lockstep with educational attainment.

Unless the education/vaccination curve has a different shape, then it would seem that the correlation is unrelated to awareness of the Tuskegee Experiment. The conclusion seems to acknowledge that the two are not causally linked. But then why include the correlation from the first quote above?

MikeUt3• 5 years ago

To show that awareness of Tuskegee is, if anything, negatively correlated with vaccination rate, and therefore unlikely to be the driver of lower vaccination rates among Blacks.

Edit: Correction: As crackercrews pointed out, I wrote "negatively correlated", when I should have written "positively correlated".

crackercrews6• 5 years ago

Doesn't it show a positive correlation?

cinquemb• 5 years ago

This also conflates institutionalized schooling with knowledge of Tuskegee (as well as education == institutionalized schooling, but this is typical among many)

Animats2• 5 years ago

The article would be more useful if, along with the table of black vaccination rates vs educational level, it had the tables for other racial groups.

civilized8• 5 years ago

On the other hand, it's a single guy challenging the conventional wisdom we hear pervasively from the prestige media with some very simple, obvious reasoning and basic data. He deserves some credit for that.

forz877• 5 years ago

I have not seen this reported anywhere in the media, could you share some links?

Talanes5• 5 years ago

I would guess that awareness of the Tuskegee Experiment and black history more generally is greater among those with higher education than those with lower education. If this guess is right...

He's starting with an assumption that disregards any factors that could make the hypothesis he's trying to disprove correct, and so of course the statistics come out in his favor.

crackercrews6• 5 years ago

Agreed. Although the article does state that it is the same for other racial groups.

It would also be helpful if he didn't limit it to people aged 30-50. What do the rates look like outside of this band?

civilized8• 5 years ago

This theory checks off certain boxes that make it resonate well within current discourse frameworks, but it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. If the coronavirus vaccines were only being given to black people, then you could see how someone might reason that it is a trick. But they are being given to everyone, including over 100 million white people. Are we meant to think that black people who aren’t getting the vaccine believe that the government is poisoning 100 million white people because the government has a racist history of poisoning black people? The racial analysis here would tell you that there is no way the white supremacist government would do such a thing and so the vaccine must be safe!

Yes, this theory was always ridiculous. Like many other things we hear from the prestige media, it barely merits an eye-roll, let alone a full refutation. Nevertheless, I appreciate Bruenig taking the time.

Sadly, our cultural-professional-managerial elites live in a weird echo chamber where such things must be said. I wonder if they themselves even believe what is coming out of their mouths.

refurb• 5 years ago

Dude is trying too hard. The rationale is simple “the govt is clearly willing to harm a group of people so why should I trust them?”

It’s not that the vaccine is another example of minorities being targeted, it’s an example of where the govt say “trust us” and minority groups have a bit more historical awareness where the govt said that and lied.

civilized8• 5 years ago

I would guess that awareness of the Tuskegee Experiment and black history more generally is greater among those with higher education than those with lower education. If this guess is right, then knowledge of historical racist medical abuses is actually strongly correlated with getting the vaccine.

bobbylarrybobby• 5 years ago

How do you know that the government is giving the same vaccines to whites and non-whites?

I mean, I'm white, and I'm pretty sure that they are, but I could forgive a black person for not being so sure.

civilized8• 5 years ago

How do we know that Hillary Clinton isn't harvesting adrenochrome from children?

hn_throwaway_992• 5 years ago

Conspiracy theories don't even make sense within their own universe any more. At a mass vaccination clinic, there is no "black line" or ""white line", people just randomly get in line, and since a vial has multiple doses in it, it's obvious the same vial serves all races of people in the line.

Favorite recent meme I saw "People who believe in conspiracy theories have never been project managers." That is, when you know how much of a herculean task it is to organize a group of say 20 people with a relatively small project, you understand how impossible it would be to have some mass, global conspiracy where everyone managed to keep their mouth shut.

Rebelgecko2• 5 years ago

If you're that concerned about getting the "wrong" vaccine, you could just lie about your race when you sign up (of course, that would only deepen the racial divide in vaccination statistics)

throwaway909495• 5 years ago

A better line of reasoning would be based on power symmetry rather than just race.

The Tuskegee experiment happened because the black population was essentially powerless to fight back, perhaps coupled with a feeling of contempt from the ruling class towards them as a people group. Power preys on weakness.

Fast forward to the current day, and although white populations have more power than black populations on average, the ruling elite has a total asymmetrical power advantage over both populations. Therefore, they are able to experiment upon the entire population without much repercussion.

Black people understand powerlessness from their history, and therefore they know to be on guard (more hesitant). White people are less familiar with powerlessness, and can be caught off guard (less hesitant).

MikeUt3• 5 years ago

The replies are so typical of these discussions. The media float a narrative without bothering to support it with any evidence. When someone actually looks and finds the easily available evidence says the exact opposite, that evidence is attacked and nitpicked as not rigorous enough to overturn the completely unsupported narrative. Where was all this skepticism before?

rallison• 5 years ago

Yes, this theory was always ridiculous. Like many other things we hear from the prestige media, it barely merits an eye-roll, let alone a full refutation. Nevertheless, I appreciate Bruenig taking the time.

I don't think that's fair. I find Bruenig's analysis reductive. It doesn't even look at Black vaccine hesitancy over time, which a halfway decent analysis would have done. What you see is that there is high hesitancy early on, and that hesitancy drops faster than many other groups as time progresses. It could be the case that skepticism, given the history of healthcare and the Black community, drove initial hesitancy, and then that waned as people saw millions of others do just fine. Bruenig's analysis would entirely miss that.

He also takes a huge leap in equating skepticism of healthcare more broadly in the Black community with skepticism of the vaccine in particular. There are so, so many assumptions he is just completely skating past here. E.g., it could entirely be the case that there is broad skepticism of healthcare in the Black community at all educational levels because of issues that persist to this very day (e.g. it's pretty well known that many people working in healthcare believe Black people are less susceptible to physical pain than white people). So, it's entirely plausible that you can start with a higher level of skepticism with respect to anything healthcare related within the Black community (e.g. because of both historical and/or current problems), but see decreasing vaccine hesitancy as education levels increase (e.g. because that correlates with better understanding of the vaccines and the trials it goes through). All of this would be entirely consistent with the data Bruenig presents, but would be entirely inconsistent with his conclusions.

What I am fundamentally getting at is that his analysis is reductive, and could potentially be explained by scenarios that are 100% counter to his conclusion.

chrismcb• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what you are saying. But there are black people who are refusing the vaccine because of what the government has done to blacks in the past.

crackercrews6• 5 years ago

It seems like the Tuskegee narrative could have been correct when vaccines were first rolled out. At that time, front-line and medical workers were being urged to get vaccinated. These populations have a disproportionate share of minorities, so it would have been plausible that they would have felt like guinea pigs.

But now that people of all races are being vaccinated, this idea doesn't make sense anymore.

MikeUt3• 5 years ago

These populations have a disproportionate share of minorities, so it would have been plausible that they would have felt like guinea pigs.

That's grossly overstating it.

Whites make up 78% of all employed people, and 72.5% of all healthcare and social assistance workers. They also make up more than 62% of workers in every single subcategory of "healthcare and human assistance". That does not strike me as even remotely under-represented enough that vaccination of healthcare workers could be seen as "whites experimenting on minorities" - not when most healthcare workers are white.

Let me put it this way: 17.4% of healthcare and social assistance workers are black. Meaning that for every one black worker that got vaccinated, more than four white workers would be vaccinated. In what way is it reasonable to see that as "whites treating minorities as guinea pigs"?

Source for employment figures: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm

Edit: If we also look at the "front-line worker who works at target, walmart, grocery stores, etc.", that would correspond to the "Supermarkets and other grocery (except convenience) stores" and "Convenience stores" categories, which are 78.4% and 72.1% white, respectively.

crackercrews6• 5 years ago

In some places, the front-line worker category included people who work at target, walmart, grocery stores, etc.

Everywhere I've lived, these people skew minority. There are probably more of them than there are front line health care workers.

I appreciate your taking the time to run the numbers on health care workers though.

cbzbc• 5 years ago

ISTR some states are asking people for their insurance details - and while refusing to give details or being uninsured won’t preclude you from getting the vaccine, I could understand how that would could act as a disincentive to poorer folk to getting vaccinated.

1024core• 5 years ago

That was because most insurance plans cover the vaccine, and the states wanted to save some money; if insurance covers your vaccine, why not bill the insurance company, eh?

newacct583• 5 years ago

This doesn't seem like a hard question to answer. Black americans are underserved by the health care system in basically all other ways. They see fewer doctors, have fewer clinics in neighborhoods where they make up majorities, get fewer referrals from the same doctors, get discharged faster and receive less treatment for the same conditions... I don't have links, but studies like this are everywhere.

So, to me the question is just "Are black americans actually responding differently to the vaccine campaign at all, or are we just measuring an effect that's been there forever?"

dudeinjapan2• 5 years ago

Access to clinics is not the limiting factor here. One can get a vaccine in 10 minutes by walking into any Walmart, Walgreens, or CVS. Even barbershops are giving them.

Mountain_Skies2• 5 years ago

In urban areas you're right but I wonder about those who live in rural areas. Having spent part of my youth in a rural area that was majority black, my first instinct would be to set up clinics at churches. Not everyone has a way to get to the county seat during business hours when the county health department is open but one way or another, pretty much everyone found a way to get to church on Sunday.

dcow• 5 years ago

Either the government should have swiftly mandated total lockdown and vaccination, or they should not have said a tweet about covid response and delegated to medical professionals and scientists. The real tragedy is that covid and vaccines have even entered the political sphere of discourse in the first place. Act swiftly with the best interest of your people at heart and face consequences later, or let the virus win while we bicker over mask mandates. All we have now is a bureaucratic mess.. truly a tragedy of the commons.

ryanobjc• 5 years ago

I mean come on dude, which world were you living in the last 18 months?

Trump and the GOP have heavily pushed covid into the political sphere. The right wing has worked relentlessly to frame the pandemic in the most political frame possible.

To try to pull some kind of 'well its really all sides' or 'all politicians <whatever>' that is doing a disservice to the truth of history.

There's a major difference between 'not wanting to cause a panic' and the total lies and abdication that characterize the early messages out of the Trump admin - think circa Feb/March 2020.

Terretta• 5 years ago

‘They would like to have the people come off. I’d rather have the people stay [on the ship]. But I’d go with them. I told them to make the final decision. I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.’ — President Trump

onlyrealcuzzo• 5 years ago

Not sure how great of a source this is - but black people at all education levels seem to be about ~8% less likely than the general population to get vaccinated [1].

However, black people at most education levels are poorer than the average population (unfortunately) - and according to this chart - poor people are also much more likely to not be vaccinated [2].

You can't really make any conclusions from the two charts - but I would guess a lot of this is because black people are disproportionately poorer than average.

[1] https://www.shadac.org/news/HPSVax-06.21#:~:text=47.0%25)%20....

[2] https://www.axios.com/covid-vaccines-low-income-poor-workers...

yodelshady• 5 years ago

Re: poorer - my partner needed the car on the day I had scheduled a jab, so I had to walk/train. The appointment, as a whole, cost an entire morning. I can work around that, but the practical issues are obvious.

A friend's anecdotal evidence was that skepticism was U-shaped as a function of age - there were older black people much more likely to have close experience of mistreatment. For reference I'm not in the US and some still bring up tuskegee, but also more typical things that do apply locally - "oh some skinheads beat you up? What a shame. Might be nasty if you made an issue of it" type stuff. Younger generations have had less mistreatment - not none, but less - and, like everyone else, are divided between pragmatic decision makers and conspiracy theorists.

Of course, if you're from certain regions of Pakistan, there is much more recent evidence of vaccines specifically being misused, and was also discussed recently on HN (as a point of pedantry, the people in question did get real vaccines. Still pretty awful). I don't believe this has had as much impact as certain sections of the media with a fetish for diaspora narratives and a poor grasp of geography would like.

johncearls• 5 years ago

In case you're interested, here's a recent preprint that breaks down the demographics of vaccine hesitancy: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...

_Algernon_• 5 years ago

https://xkcd.com/985/

Mountain_Skies2• 5 years ago

Has anyone tried actually surveying the black community for an explanation?

robbrown451• 5 years ago

I'm not sure that would give an accurate answer.

If you were to ask the other big demographic, they'll tend to come up with all kinds of reasons such as "the vaccine is new and hasn't been tested enough" and the like. But at the end of the day, they are biased against it because others in their peer group are against it (or because they feel pressured by "the other side"). This is obvious due to the strong correlation to political leanings.

But they try to intellectualize it to be some other reason. They may not be lying, but they may not understand why they had a tendency to be averse to vaccination.

vfclists2• 5 years ago

It is not the black community that has to be surveyed, it is about asking those black people who don't want to take it why they don't want to take it.

It is not about surveying everyone.

Irongirl12• 5 years ago

I am a "black person who doesn't want to take it."

So I can help you: NO.

I am also a teeny tiny bit Cherokee.

So I can Help you: NO.

I don't to explain anything to you because you are not my mother, father or tribal chief.

NO.

Why??? Because I said so.

Irongirl12• 5 years ago

Stay out of our communities, please. Chip and Karen coming around with a clipboard being nosy will not help you understand what you are obviously not capable of grasping.

Remember the tshirt : "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you."

croes• 5 years ago

If the coronavirus vaccines were only being given to black people, then you could see how someone might reason that it is a trick. But they are being given to everyone, including over 100 million white people.

You could still give the whites the real vaccine and experiment with the blacks.

js2• 5 years ago

The experts I’ve talked to say issues like accessibility, a lack of investment in Black communities and overall health inequities are the biggest barriers for Black people to get the coronavirus vaccine.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fewer-black-america...

Barriers to vaccine access faced in many Hispanic communities — alongside the structural limitations communities of color generally face — stand in the way of higher vaccination rates, even as the vaccine becomes more widely available, according to public health experts and community health organizers.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/29/us/hispanic-v...

kook_throwaway• 5 years ago

Post was pretty weak.

To start, it's not only the US government but also big pharma that have experimented on African(American)s[1][2], including Pfizer[3]. In Africa, Incidents like these have contributed to a distrust against Western medicine and vaccines[4].

Also saying that because the vaccines are being given to everyone they can't disproportionally affect certain demographics doesn't really fly either. Systemic racism is nearly synonymous with things that are on their face applied equally but don't end up being fair in the end. You could for example distribute certain drugs to certain neighborhood (pop up vaccination or other demographically targeted events). Lastly, racial differences in both disease and pharmacological response to drugs aren't uncommon. [5].

Approximately one-fifth of new drugs approved in the past 6 years demonstrated differences in exposure and/or response across racial/ethnic groups, translating to population-specific prescribing recommendations in a few cases.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_experimentation_in_A...

[2] https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2007/12/102785/scholar-speaks-abou...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullahi_v._Pfizer,_Inc.

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/opinion/31washington.html

[5] https://ascpt.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cpt.61

narrator• 5 years ago

I'd say it's because the unemployment rate among blacks is high, so they don't have to get it for their jobs at the same rate. They are also poorer, so they don't get it to travel, or go do other rich people stuff. It's probably as simple as that.

Also, from what I've seen, anti-vax videos are popular on WorldstarHipHop.com and other black culture venues. They often have very little censorship compared to YouTube.

morpheos137• 5 years ago

No because probably most African Americans haven't heard of it.

vfclists2• 5 years ago

Why don't those who are interested simply ask the black people who don't want to be vaccinated why they don't want to be vaccinated and stop all this speculative wankery?

bell-cot• 5 years ago

TL;DR summary: No, but "Tuskegee experiment" is a convenient story and easy excuse.

More interesting would be a comparison of COVID vaccination rates (among American blacks) with their acceptance rates of routine childhood vaccinations, tetanus or rabies vaccines following an injury or wild animal bite, and similar.

twelfthmile• 5 years ago

Many black people's view of healthcare in America is already negative, https://theundefeated.com/features/new-poll-shows-black-amer... and negative experiences are often communicated first and second-hand. Black americans are also more willing than other groups to believe in genocidal conspiracy theories,

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2569474/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16009745/

There is an ongoing awareness of the Tuskegee experiment in the black community because in every group discussion (among just black people) of the covid vaccines I've observed someone will bring it up.

That said, I'd say it is just one piece of America's extensive history of race-targeted abuse that black Americans are hyper aware of and fuels belief in nonsense conpsiracies.

It does receive quite a lot of outsized attention in media like NPR and academia, to which the original article appears to be responding.

Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

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