Dr. Rita McGuire, an obstetrician and infection control specialist at Roseland Community Hospital talks Friday, Jan. 29, 2021, with staff members about taking the COVID-19 vaccine.
"It’s not something that I trust right now,’’ says Bland, 50, who worries about how quickly the COVID-19 vaccines were developed.
Many holdouts come from the mostly Black, working class neighborhoods surrounding the hospital, areas hard hit by the virus yet plagued with vaccine reluctance.
She acknowledged "centuries of medical injustice’’ against Black Americans but said COVID-19 vaccines resulted from years of solid research.
Many workers ‘’have not forgotten about those studies where they used us as experiments,’’ McGuire said, including the infamous Tuskegee research on Black patients with syphilis.