This Vaccination Rollout Is Going Exactly as Terribly as You Knew It Would

Black folks don’t trust the system because this is what it looks like when it works

Michael Arceneaux
LEVEL

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A man speaks with a member of the National Guard after receiving a coronavirus vaccine in the parking lot of Six Flags on February 6, 2021 in Bowie, Maryland.
A man speaks with a member of the National Guard after receiving a coronavirus vaccine in the parking lot of Six Flags on February 6, 2021 in Bowie, Maryland. Photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

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As far as the effort to vaccinate my Black ass goes, I don’t require much in the way of convincing. Whatever gets me back to some semblance of normal life — which in my case would be the ability to rap Cardi B’s “Up” out loud at a bar, party, or Walmart parking lot in the South maskless without fear of death — I’m down. But based on my text messages, conversations with select kinfolk, and surveying social media, others in my demo are going to need a wee bit more convincing.

In a New York Times op-ed released on Sunday, more than 60 Black members of the National Academy of Medicine pleaded with Black people to get vaccinated for Covid-19. “We feel compelled to make the case that all Black Americans should … protect themselves from a pandemic that has disproportionately killed them at a rate 1.5 times as high as white Americans … a rate that is most likely very conservative,” wrote Thomas A. LaVeist, PhD and Georges C. Benjamin, MD.

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Michael Arceneaux
LEVEL

New York Times bestselling author of “I Can’t Date Jesus” and “I Don’t Want To Die Poor.”