Richard Rose is all about safety.
The President of Atlanta’s NAACP chapter said he received his COVID-19 vaccination because of his asthma. He also has led the chapter’s charge in getting members of the Black community vaccinated. Recently, he sat with Dr. Maya Green, also known as Dr. Maya 100, on “Health IQ” to discuss his take of vaccines.
Do you see a role for vaccinations in our community?
Vaccinations are really a part of the social structure we’re in now. Vaccinations are nothing new. As a kid, the big deal was the polio scare. First, it was the salt vaccination, which was actually an inoculation. Then later on, there was another developed called the saving vaccine, which was an oral vaccine, they put it on sugar cube and put it on our tongues. I’m still here without polio, but it was a big scare, it was a virus. It was something that people were afraid of, they had pictures of patients in iron lungs because… the respiratory system has shut down.
That is the vision that I see about new diseases. I think about the polio scare of the ’50s and ’60s and say, “Hey, so when this new disease came along, I had confidence that a vaccine would be developed.” I just didn’t know how long it would take and what the ramifications might be. But I had confidence in the medical profession, because I knew those biology and chemistry nerds from Clark College, who went on to become physicians or anesthesiologist or epidemiologists, and I knew they were serious about what they did. And I had every confidence that the vaccine would be developed.
How did you feel about COVID, or polio, when there wasn’t a vaccine versus now when there is one?
For me, as a child, I was afraid of polio. The medical community said, “Hey if it gave the symptoms, be careful.” We would advise young people to take a nap during the day to try to build their resistance, and other other precautionary things, much like the precautions the CDC gave out in the early months of the pandemic to avoid the infection because we cannot cure the infection, we know that the medical community cannot kill viruses in your body.
… We have not cured the common cold, the flu or influenza. But all of that research, all of those attempts to bring cures and treatment have led us to the COVID-19 vaccine, and others. I mean, they had the ebola virus a few years ago that decimated portions of Africa. I think there were only one or two cases I read about that were actually in the United States of America. We see the work, and we trust the work. We don’t think that any of us is perfect. Only God is perfect. But [vaccine success] is in the high 90s, so that’s good enough for me.
