One thing I haven’t seen mentioned here yet is that at least in America, we have had a historic problem with minority groups (especially Black people) and distrust of the medical field in general that’s pretty freaking justified. This study speaks about it in depth. but here’s some relevant points from the abstract:

Given that the virus has hit the Black community the hardest, I am concerned now that vaccine hesitancy may perpetuate the health disparities that we are currently seeing in the numbers of infections and deaths taking place. Most studies, for instance, at this point, have found that Blacks as a community have the highest levels of individuals who state they will never get the vaccine or are not sure if they will get the vaccine, Fig. Fig.11 [7, 8]. Many studies have noted that Black people cite distrust in the government and in the medical profession. Black people cite our nation’s history of racism in medical research and in medical care as key reasons for their hesitancy [9, 10].

For some people it is a real, deep distrust in the government. Like I said though, it’s justified. You don’t have to look far to see examples of what they’re talking about. J. Marion Sims was hailed as a medical hero for developing new surgical techniques, but he practiced and developed them on non consenting black slave women and immigrant Irish women. That’s by far from the worst though, if you’ve never read of it, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study is fucking horrifying.

The Public Health Service started the study in 1932 in collaboration with Tuskegee University (then the Tuskegee Institute), a historically Black college in Alabama. In the study, investigators enrolled a total of 600 impoverished African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama.[6] Of these men, 399 had latent syphilis, with a control group of 201 men who were not infected.[5] As an incentive for participation in the study, the men were promised free medical care. While the men were provided with both medical and mental care that they otherwise would not have received,[7] they were deceived by the PHS, who never informed them of their syphilis diagnosis[6][8][9][10][11] and provided disguised placebos, ineffective methods, and diagnostic procedures as treatment for “bad blood”.[12]

The men were initially told that the experiment was only going to last six months, but it was extended to 40 years.[5] After funding for treatment was lost, the study was continued without informing the men that they would never be treated. None of the infected men were treated with penicillin despite the fact that, by 1947, the antibiotic was widely available and had become the standard treatment for syphilis.[13]

The study continued, under numerous Public Health Service supervisors, until 1972, when a leak to the press resulted in its termination on November 16 of that year.[14] By then, 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients’ wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.[15]

This study kept uneducated, rural black people from receiving adequate care for their known Syphilis infections for TWENTY FIVE YEARS after we knew about how to treat the disease. People were infected. Children were infected. People died from this study.

For background, I’m very pro-vaccine, so much so that I wanted to study biomedical sciences and immunology. But I think it’s extremely important to realize the sociological backgrounds as to why some people distrust the system and are suspicious of “free medical care” especially when sponsored by the government. The first study I linked talks about it, and I definitely agree that there is SO much work to be done in the US around trust in public health institutions.