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In his last Tweeter, Hank Aaron sent a message to black Americans that coronavirus vaccinations are safe.
“I was proud to have received the COVID-19 vaccine earlier today at Morehouse School of Medicine,” he wrote on Twitter on January 5. “I hope you do the same!”
After Aaron died at age 86 on Friday, some vaccine skeptics and immunization advocates latched onto the tweet to spread misinformation about the vaccine.
The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office said Monday that Aaron, considered one of the greatest all-rounders in baseball history, has died of natural causes.
But that didn’t stop people from suggesting otherwise on social media, including the Clubhouse audio-only app. On Twitter, anti-vaccination activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote that Aaron’s death was “is part of a wave of suspicious deaths“linked to the vaccine.
Peter Hotez, professor of pediatrics and molecular biology and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, predicted this would happen.
“I am terribly sad at the loss of Hank Aaron, one of my important childhood heroes,” Hotez tweeted Friday. “In the meantime, I am preparing for the reaction of those who will try to exploit this and attribute his death to a #covid vaccination.”
Hotez, the author of “Vaccines Didn’t Cause Rachel’s Autism,” said it was the “modus operandi” of anti-vaxxers.
“They are opportunists,” he said in an interview on Monday. “They will try to watch whatever they can.”
They also specifically try to target African Americans with their messages, he said.
“So that kind of two birds with a stone for them,” Hotez said, referring to Aaron’s death.
Aaron was publicly vaccinated with other civil rights leaders this month in Georgia to reassure and encourage black Americans – many of whom, experts say, don’t trust coronavirus vaccines – to do the same.
Dr Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean of Emory University School of Medicine, said the public nature of Aaron’s decision turned out to be a double-edged sword.
“We are making its vaccination public so that it can be used to boost vaccination,” del Rio said on Monday. “Unfortunately, because his vaccination was made public and then he died, now we have a little boomerang effect in which he comes to haunt us because he died.”
But in reality, del Rio said he had “absolute confidence that his death had nothing to do with the vaccine and that it had to do with his being old and frail.”
Del Rio said coronavirus vaccines are safe and effective and prevent people from dying from the deadly virus that has killed more than 400,000 people in the United States
Both Hotez and del Rio have said they believe many people are missing: nearly 2 million Americans over 65 die each year.
“If you vaccinate a lot of people over 65, a number will die from causes unrelated to the vaccines,” Hotez said. “So explaining this is really important.”
It should be remembered, del Rio said, that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the majority of people who died from Covid-19 in the United States through January 16 were people 65 and older.
“I’d rather have the vaccine than Covid,” del Rio said.
Sandra Lindsay, a Jamaican-born intensive care nurse who was the first person in New York City to receive the vaccine, said mistrust in the black community stems from past harmful practices, such as the Tuskegee study in which American health care workers have not treated syphilis. Black men without their consent to analyze the effects. Lindsay said the study was mentioned frequently by patients, including children.
“People keep coming back to that,” Lindsay said in an interview Monday. “We know it was hurtful and inhuman and painful and hurtful.”
Lindsay said she volunteered to be among the first to take the coronavirus vaccine at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, where she is the director of critical care nursing, because she wanted to “inspire people who look like me ”.
“When people tell me about their fears, I never dismiss them,” said Lindsay, 52. “I’m a black woman. And I know what’s happened in the past, and it’s something that I had to struggle with.”
Since the start of the pandemic, some black celebrities have faced backlash for pushing unfounded coronavirus plots to a population that was very suspicious of medical research.
R&B singer Keri Hilson has been widely criticized for falsely linking the coronavirus to 5G networks in social media posts last March. Then Hilson said that at the request of his management, she had deleted videos and articles that she had helped raise and that whatever the cause, the virus is “a real thing”. And in December, singer and actor Tyrese Gibson came under fire for writing in an Instagram post that one of his secrets to staying Covid-free is sleeping with the temperature at 90 degrees every night. The World Health Organization has said, “Exposing yourself to the sun or to temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius (75 degrees Fahrenheit) does not prevent or cure COVID-19.”
Lindsay believes it is the responsibility of healthcare workers and other members of the medical community to educate people and address their concerns about vaccines.
“Encourage them to ask questions,” she says. “And hire them and educate them to dispel some of these conspiracy theories.”
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