Dionne Warwick wasn’t exactly wrong about the coronavirus vaccine
“No. Not yet. It’s a choice that everybody has to make and that’s my choice is to wait and see,” the 80-year-old legend responded. She marveled at the speed with which the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were approved by the FDA, especially considering how long it took the agency to approve AIDS medications. And then Warwick further explained her wait-and-see attitude. “It still takes a good minute to be proven to be quite effective,” Warwick explained. “So I’m going to give it a chance to be effective.”
My own mother, a 79-year-old retired registered nurse, concurred. “I am with Dionne,” she texted me immediately after the interview. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Data from the clinical trials for both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines showed them to be 94.5 percent and 95 percent effective, respectively. So, what’s with the wait-and-see attitude? There are two answers, one scientific and one historical.
“We have no idea. All the clinical trials of the vaccines, both Moderna and Pfizer have been less than three months. So we don’t have any durable data to look at,” Garrett responded in what struck me as an unwitting validation of Warwick’s wait-and-see. “When we look at people who have been naturally infected and have recovered from COVID, there is evidence that people are still making antibodies after six months. It remains to be seen what is the nature of a durable immune response to this virus. We do not know the answer to that question.”
What really irked me were the messages I received from viewers who immediately dubbed Warwick an anti-vaxxer. It was an accusation that completely missed the nuance of what she said. “Waiting” is not the same as “never” and neither Warwick nor my mother, for that matter, ever said, “Never.” It’s a distinction without a difference unless you’re Black, especially a Black person of Warwick’s and my mother’s generation. In that distinction is the difference between safeguarding one’s health and being experimented on.
My colleague Michele Norris homed in on that distinction in a powerful column earlier this month that put “vaccine hesitancy” among Black Americans into much-needed context. “It’s not that Black Americans don’t believe in vaccines,” she wrote. “They don’t trust a public health system that has in too many cases engaged in grievous harm by experimenting on Black bodies without consent or ignoring the specific needs of Black people.” Case in point: Susan Moore, a Black doctor in Indiana who chronicled on Facebook her disparate treatment for COVID-19 before passing away on Dec. 20.
“Trust has to be earned,” Norris told me during a segment on Sunday’s show. “And it has to be recognized that when people are wary of the vaccine it is for good reason. It is reasonable. Don’t portray them as a community that’s ignorant or uninformed about their health. They are making a reasonable decision and you have to earn their trust.” Kali Cyrus, a psychiatrist here in Washington who was also on the show, talked about why she released a video on Twitter that explained why she put her nervousness as a Black person aside to “trust science.”
In the end, Corey Hébert, a doctor in New Orleans who is part of the Louisiana governor’s COVID-19 task force and a principal investigator for the Sanofi vaccine effort, revealed a mantra on Sunday that encapsulates what we all will have to do if we are to crush the coronavirus pandemic. “Wash up, mask up, separate and vaccinate,” he said. “That’s what you must do so we can get through this thing and get back to normal.”
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