Done Dying, Not To Be A Hidden Figure II
Going on record, Accord1 is pro-vaccine. Accord1 is nonpartisan. Vaccination is not a political issue; it is a health issue, and we are pro-health, especially in the face of so many historic racial health care disparities. In past posts, we have brought to the forefront former well-documented injustices, such as the Tuskegee experiment, the Henrietta Lacks exploitation and black women’s sterilization in the eighteen hundreds.
Now is an opportunity to turn the narrative. Suppose black and brown people and their allies want to dismantle systemic racism and bring about racial equity. In that case, there is no better way to level the playing field than by keeping those populations out of ICUs nationwide.
People of color can not allow the vaccinated v nonvaccinated to become another way to foster Jim Crow-like segregation, health disparities, and societal inequities to occur over the card-carrying fully vaccinated and those who are not.
The Delta variant is ravaging through Great Britton and now attempts to take America’s possible return to normality away. Last year the NAACP launched a promotion entitled “Done Dying” in protest of Police Brutality. With the disastrous loss of many African American lives, must we be so misguided to allow black populations to slip into the perils of mortality again. The African American community needs to, with all diligence, search for truth. This search must go deeper than a catchy jingle in a commercial or a partisan Facebook post.
Noted Eppidemeologist who developed the Moderna vaccine Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett expressed the following: “We have to reframe the way we speak about people’s decisions when it comes to their health. When I was meeting people, it wasn’t that they were so pronounced in their decision to not get the vaccine yet. It was just that they needed a couple of questions answered. And vaccine hesitancy actually just started to carry a very negative connotation.”
Compassion, Education, and Community will bring us through to the next chapter on the other side.
Compassion is a significant part of African American culture’s maternal leanings. The family’s well-being is of great importance, including multigeneration preservation. People need to see this as more than an individual issue; it is ultimately a family issue.
Education can be no easier explained than simply filling in the blanks of those legitimate questions which many people ask.
Community: “It takes a village.” This belief reinforces a collective cultural lens. “If I protect myself, I will also cover my community, neighborhood, street, school, etc.”
It would be an oversimplification to lump African American hesitancy into the group, including many conspiracy theory believers, political partisans, or antivaxxers. The reluctance is comprehensive.
If we could borrow the phrase “Done Dying” and expand it. This vaccine is our chance to be “Done Dying” from COVID 19
“Black people have definitely earned the right to be skeptical of the medical profession and to ask questions. But it’s become abundantly clear to me that the vaccines are effective and safe and that any minimal, tiny, tiny, infinitesimal risk that comes from the vaccine is much, much, much less than the risk that we’ve already seen play out of getting the virus itself,” -John Legend
Kevin Robinson Executive Director of Accord1 and
Founder of Three-Fifths Magazine threefifths.online
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