Many Californians, particularly Black residents, would skip taking COVID-19 vaccine today, survey finds

As scientists race to develop COVID-19 vaccines, a new poll shows fewer than one-third of Black residents in California plan to get immunized. “We’ve seen this even in terms of other types of immunizations.” The poll results released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California show that a majority of those surveyed, 57%, said they would either definitely or probably get a COVID-19 vaccine if it were available today. “So when people say, ‘Why don’t you guys come and get a COVID vaccine?’ at a time when these sorts of issues around systemic racism are being countered by the current administration saying that they don’t even believe that systemic racism exists, it is very difficult to engender the level of trust that you need to allow people to let you inject them with a live, active disease,” she said. Overall, 68% of respondents in the recent Public Policy Institute of California poll said they were more concerned with vaccine approval moving too fast, “without fully establishing it is safe and effective.” Only 26% expressed greater worry with the process progressing too slowly and “creating unnecessary delays in providing access.” Just above three-quarters of Black respondents said they were more concerned with the vaccine approval process being too fast, compared with 73% of Asian Americans, 69% of whites and 63% of Latinos. John Romley, a senior fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics and one of the paper’s authors, said that COVID-19 “is sort of becoming a perfect storm with some longstanding social problems that we have.” Compounding the problem is that Black Americans historically have been less likely to participate in the clinical trials used to establish whether a vaccine is safe and effective, researchers wrote — a potential absence that looms especially large given the rapid push to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus.