Racial Minorities Need the Covid-19 Vaccine the Most, but Prioritizing Them Will Be Difficult
Legal, ethical, and cultural roadblocks will make distribution tricky
People of color have been hit disproportionately hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other people of color dying at higher rates than white people, they also have less access to testing and to medical support, plus the added obstacles created by centuries of structural racism. Their vulnerability warrants prioritization when a Covid-19 vaccine is made available. In its recent guidance on how to distribute the vaccine, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) recommended prioritizing racial minorities who are “worse off” socioeconomically and epidemiologically.
But distributing a vaccine on the basis of race on a national scale will be very difficult to do, for legal, ethical, and cultural reasons. In a viewpoint recently published in the medical journal JAMA, and in an accompanying live Q&A that aired last week, two of the authors — professor Lawrence O. Gostin, from Georgetown University’s School of Global Health Law, and Michelle A. Williams, dean of the faculty of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health — explained the challenges of implementing a national race-based…
