New York Governor Andrew Cuomo shared a cartoon rap video featuring DMC of RUN DMC to promote the vaccine to black people. While the cartoon does not expressly say the purpose is to convince blacks to get the vaccine, it is pretty obvious that is the case. Everyone in the cartoon is black, it’s a rap song, and it has a moderate level of celebrity power with DMC as the lead, even if in cartoon form. The cartoon is not surprising since there are countless “think-pieces” littering the internet focused on why black Americans are the most averse to get the vaccine out of any other group in the United States.
Much of the “think-piece” content surrounding black people in America and the vaccine has a general tone of confusion. People who write those articles simply do not understand where the lack of enthusiasm to get the vaccine in the black community comes from. Random theories get thrown out on said articles, such as black people not having access to computers or there being some type of race discrimination problem. Neither one of those reasons are true. The black community has a higher-than-normal aversion to getting the vaccine due to other vaccines/shots/therapies in recent memory not performing as promised.
The Tuskegee Experiment is the most obvious case of a disease “treatment” going wrong in the United States and black people were the only ones harmed. From the 1930s to the 1970s, hundreds of black men were essentially guinea pigs for an experiment conducted by a “health” division within the US Government. The men were told that they would get free health care from the Government, but in reality they were intentionally not given treatment to study how untreated Syphilis would behave in the human body.
There are also other “treatment” and “vaccine” related scandals that have happened in the United States, some as recently as the 1990s and maybe even later than that if one considers the opioid crisis the fault of pharmaceutical companies. Polio was mentioned in the rap video as something that was eradicated by vaccines but they don’t speak about the controversial first roll-out of a polio vaccine that killed hundreds, if not thousands of people. It is going to take much more than a half-baked rap video to convince people to take a brand-new vaccine that was developed in record time.
SOURCES:
CDC COVID Data Tracker
VAERS – Data
Black doctors’ group takes aim at Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy
Gianni Russo on Escobar, Trump, Putin, Marilyn Monroe, “Italian TK Kirkland” (Full Interview) – YouTube
African-Americans struggling to receive the COVID-19 vaccine – WDEF
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