Atlanta NAACP President Richard Rose wants to protect himself and his loved ones.
Recently, he stopped by rolling out’s weekly Health IQ LIVE session to explain why it’s absolutely vital for members of the Black community to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
What is the importance of trusting the government in regard to receiving the vaccine?
I try to separate the government, meaning bureaucrats, from the science. The CDC is an agency of the government. But it does have a history of sometimes disagreeing with the political side of the government.
We know vaccines are nothing new. Nowadays, children receive measles, rubella, smallpox and polio [vaccines]. When I was a child, polio was a new vaccine, so they brought it to our schools. We took it on the sugar, coke, and a sugar cube, put it on our tongues, and we think it was two or three doses. We trusted the vaccine because it was being given to everybody.
Now, this is a vaccine that’s available for everybody. Black scientists have had a great role in developing this vaccine. Kizzmekia Corbett is the doctor who was on the mRNA side of this vaccine.
I think there are a lot of reasons [for distrust of the government]. We know in the past, distressful things have been done by government agencies. The Tuskegee experiment, for example. It started out to [find out what the] disease called syphilis was, which is a sexually transmitted disease? How does it affect people who have it because when they first started the experiment, there was no vaccine to cure syphilis.’
About 12 years ago, 40 years into the program, the untreated and infected patients in this study were still not given this vaccine. This happened deep in Alabama, in Tuskegee at the hospital.
It was a tragedy and a travesty, absolutely, but this is not the Tuskegee experiment.
How did you feel when there was no vaccine, versus now when there is a vaccine for COVID-19?
Personally, there was a lot of trepidation because I’ve lived with asthma since I had the measles as a child.
This COVID infection attacks the lungs and the breathing apparatus. I was very much concerned, I wore a mask everywhere, I distanced, I washed my hands a lot, and I stayed away from people because I wanted to stay healthy.
Because, if I can’t be healthy, I can’t do this work we do for NAACP. It was big in 2020, we had big elections across the country. We were leading a Get Out the Vote effort across the state of Georgia. And I needed to be in the fight.
So, I was listening to the science and the scientists are those nerds we knew in high school and college that didn’t go to parties, didn’t go to football games. They were serious about their studies. I knew they were serious about what they were doing and I listen to the nerds.
