PRAIRIE VIEW, Texas (May 4, 2021) – On Tuesday, May 4, Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) is participating in HBCU COVID Awareness and Resilience Day (HBCU-CARD), a nationwide-but-local effort taking aim at vaccine hesitancy and, in particular, the unequal burden of COVID-19 that falls on African American communities.
Five student panelists, including four students from PVAMU and one student from Howard University, will conduct an organized presentation that includes discussions of topics, such as COVID-19 and at-risk populations, vaccine hesitancy, and how COVID-19 vaccines are made. A general question and answer period will follow. “We’ll wrap it up with a game, testing participants’ vaccine knowledge,” said Tondra Moore, Ph.D., founder and leader of the PVAMU COVID-19 Student Leaders Program. Moore also serves as executive director of the university’s Health Services Department.
Moore said PVAMU joined the Howard University-sponsored event after the PVAMU COVID-19 Student Leaders began to organize its own town hall to take place the same week. This same group at PVAMU has been developing programming and information since December 2020 to provide students with support in navigating life on campus amid a pandemic.
“I think what Dr. Moore is doing is really tremendous,” said Assistant Professor Noel M. Estwick, Ph.D. Estwick serves as the PVAMU representative for the HBCU Emergency Management Workforce Consortium at Howard. “I think a lot of good things are going to come out of this — a higher profile for the school with the consortium and many resistant people getting vaccinated.”
It’s a time of rampant mis- and disinformation, and in related news, more resistance to science than at any time since the Age of Enlightenment. A few weeks ago, a student told Estwick that she would not get the shot because doing so would affect her ability to have a child (something for which there is no scientific foundation). The student also knew (through a friend) a Houston nurse who was urging people not to get vaccinated. “I just held my head,” said Estwick. “You know who she believes.”
Available evidence proves that minority communities are suffering far more than other communities during the pandemic; just to cite one data point, African Americans are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates than other ethnic groups. Concurrently, African Americans are lagging in the rate of vaccination.
HBCU-CARD is founded on the idea that students can help bridge these conspicuous gaps. “We believe that it starts with the students because they can influence the people around them,” said Breonne Watts, a senior health major at PVAMU, who is a member of the COVID-19 Student Leaders Program. “There’s a lot of vaccine skepticism and mistrust of the government. We have to help bring the information to our community of people and get people educated about COVID-19 vaccines.”
Watts said that the question of who would be the right messenger for the COVID-19 vaccine campaign came up during the group’s first meeting. In fact, she said, “We raised it. Why would people trust us if they don’t trust the government? But it’s not just anyone presenting information — it’s students supported by advisors from [PVAMU’s] Health Services Department, College of Nursing and Texas Undergraduate Medical Academy. During the event, we will have members of these different groups presenting information and answering questions from a scientific standpoint. The information we’re getting is from the CDC, the World Health Organization, medical journals — all from credible sources.”
“Students are influential at home, so the thought process was that if students weren’t going to get vaccinated, they were probably going to influence people at home not to get vaccinated,” said Estwick. “So, we said, if we can get the facts to the students and get them involved in busting some of these myths about the vaccines, then we can increase the rates of vaccination in Black and brown communities.”
To lend even more credibility, recent graduates of Howard University’s medical school are being utilized by PVAMU and a number of other HBCUs to participate in various local HBCU-CARD events. “The hope is that young medical professionals can be influencers in the community,” Estwick said. “We want people to see that young Black doctors are embracing this.”
The Tuskegee Study still casts a long shadow, but there are other reasons for vaccine hesitancy. The most recent was the pause in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine rollout, which wreaked havoc in the HBCU-CARD world. “People have no problem getting a flu shot every year; why is there such opposition to the vaccine?” wondered Estwick.
“There are a lot of different factors that play into vaccine hesitancy,” said Moore. “People’s understanding of the history of medical ethics and medical malpractice plays into their hesitancy. The systemic racism that has been a part of healthcare plays into how minorities encounter healthcare professionals and how they view some of the initiatives that are brought to them. And, at this point, unlike any other time in history, people’s personal politics actually plays into vaccine hesitancy.”
HBCU-CARD is a chance for a reset, which this group takes very seriously.
“We’re approaching them with facts. I think that’s the best way,” said Moore. “You can’t dismiss a person’s concern, but you have to give them the facts that help them understand that this is now the best evidence and it’s not the same as whatever happened in the past. You have to come in and meet people where they are: Acknowledge their concern, and then give them whatever information you possibly can, with compassion, to help them overcome their barriers.”
The student-led, virtual town hall on May 4 runs from 5-7 p.m. and will be available via @PV_HealthServices, the Twitter feed of Prairie View’s Health Services Department. Click here for more information.
By Andrew Cohen
-PVAMU-