Posted on February 21, 2021

Blacks Say No to the Vaccine

Robert Hampton, American Renaissance, February 21, 2021

A group called Hip Hop Public Health has produced rap videos to persuade blacks to get the COVID vaccine. Rapper Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC tells blacks that the virus is “killing our people” and to take the “completely safe” vaccine.

A second video is even more racial. “Trust me, believe me. We’re not gonna have another Tuskegee. This ain’t eugenics, nuh uh, no way,” Mr. McDaniels raps as he cuts down a tree emblazoned with the word “Eugenics.” He says black doctors and experts were involved and the vaccine “doesn’t have anything to do with race.”

The videos are supposed to persuade reluctant blacks to take the vaccine because in both the U.S. and the U.K., few are signing up for it. Only 4.5 percent of black Americans have had the shot, compared to 9.1 percent of whites and 8.6 percent of Asians. Only 55 percent of British blacks in their 70s or older are vaccinated, while 86 percent of whites that age are. Forty-two percent of American blacks told pollsters they would get the vaccine, a lot fewer than the 63 percent of whites and 83 percent of “English-speaking Asian-Americans” who said they would. This is not what you might expect. More blacks (71 percent) than Americans in general (50 percent) say they know someone who died from COVID or was hospitalized.

There is even more reluctance in Britain. Seventy-two percent of blacks say they are unlikely to get vaccinated, while 82 percent of all Britons say they are likely to get the jab. Black doctors and nurses are skeptics. At the University Hospitals of Leicester, only 36 percent of black medical staff had got the vaccine, as opposed to 70 percent for whites. The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies blamed this on “structural and institutional racism and discrimination.”

That’s the usual argument. Blacks are supposed to be worried about the Tuskegee syphilis study (even though it was not at all as it has been described) and other “racist” abuses. Here a straight-news piece from USA Today:

Since the country’s inception, the American medical institution has subjected Black bodies to abuse, exploitation and experimentation. Corpses being pulled from the ground for scientific study. Black women being sterilized without their knowledge and robbed of the opportunity to bear children. An entire Black community misled into believing they were immune from a fatal illness. Time and time again, Black people have been betrayed by the medical establishment, fostering a lingering, deep-rooted mistrust.

The article even drags out slave ship doctors and plantation medicine to explain black fears.

coronavirus vaccine

February 19, 2021, Bridgnorth, UK: A vial of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine prepared for injection at the Northgate Health Centre in Bridgnorth. (Credit Image: © Nick Potts/PA Wire via ZUMA Press)

President Joe Biden had a different explanation: “Not everybody in the community, in the Hispanic and African-American community . . . don’t know how to use, know how to get online to determine how to get in-line for that COVID vaccination.” The President took heat for this, but he’s lucky he’s a Democrat.

Everyone else agrees that we must now make a special effort to convince blacks to take the vaccine. The American Medical Association wants “predominantly white institutions” to hand over resources to “Black physicians and Black researchers to implement the cultural approaches they know will work with Black communities.” And, of course, there must be “structural changes” to eliminate “structural racism” in medicine.

Another idea is to get blacks to preach the vaccine. “This is Black history month,” says Rev. R. B. Holmes Jr. “We need to make history by saving more of our people.”

Not all influential blacks are going along. Many NBA players refuse to take the vaccine or promote it. The league is paying for public service announcements, but several of its top players won’t participate. Players reportedly worry that the “process was rushed, that the vaccine can alter genetics, that the trials lacked diversity.”

No one knows if rap videos and NBA PSAs will do any good, but racism is always the problem. Whatever happens, there won’t be country-music videos telling white people to get the shot.