Dusty Baker is urging people to have faith in an effort to save the lives of one of the country’s most endangered communities, as suspicion threatens to stem the impact of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The Houston Astros manager asked Black Americans to be vaccinated on Monday, the same day Sandra Lindsay, a black nurse in New York, became the first person in the country to be vaccinated against the corona virus outside a medical trial.
Baker praised James Hildreth, a leading immunologist and black man who sat on the FDA panel that voted in favor of recognizing the emergency release of the Pfizer vaccine last week.
“There was an African-American doctor in charge of the vaccine,” Baker told reporters in a video call Monday. “I felt very comfortable that he and other African-Americans were on the boards to bring the vaccine.”
“He assured that this would not be another Dusky type of experiment. He urged black Americans to use the vaccine.”
What is the Dusky test?
Vaccine suspicion is skeptical in many communities as misinformation about the unsubstantiated health threats of vaccines undermines their use.
That suspicion weighs heavily on some black communities, an infamous 40-year study that began in 1932 that misled black participants in the U.S. public health service about their health status. The study deliberately withheld proper treatment from its participants, eventually finding that some died of the disease.
Baker joins black voices advocating for the COVID-19 vaccine
Lindsay, who spoke to The New York Times about her decision to volunteer as the first American to be vaccinated, echoed Baker’s commitment to vaccine protection as one of the MLP’s two black managers and leader of the black community.
“That’s the goal today,” Lindsay told the Times. “Not to be the first person to be vaccinated, but to encourage people like me who are generally skeptical of getting vaccinated.”
Black Americans at high risk for corona virus exposure
While experts are concerned about the distrust of the COVID-19 vaccine in the black community, black Americans are more susceptible to the deadly effects of the corona virus than white Americans.
According to the CDC, black Americans are 1.4 times more likely to contract COVID-19, 3.7 times more likely to be hospitalized by COVID-19, and 2.8 times more likely to die from the disease than their white counterparts. Socio-economic status of CDCs, access to health care, and increased exposure to the corona virus related to aggression all contribute to increased risk.
Baker addressed the increased risk of being motivated to speak on Monday.
“Because not only do we catch it, we die very easily from it,” Baker said.
More from Yahoo Sports: