Does the Tuskegee experiment explain black vaccination rates?

A friend's anecdotal evidence was that skepticism was U-shaped as a function of age - there were older black people much more likely to have close experience of mistreatment. For reference I'm not in the US and some still bring up tuskegee, but also more typical things that do apply locally - "oh some skinheads beat you up? What a shame. Might be nasty if you made an issue of it" type stuff. Younger generations have had less mistreatment - not none, but less - and, like everyone else, are divided between pragmatic decision makers and conspiracy theorists.

Of course, if you're from certain regions of Pakistan, there is much more recent evidence of vaccines specifically being misused, and was also discussed recently on HN (as a point of pedantry, the people in question did get real vaccines. Still pretty awful). I don't believe this has had as much impact as certain sections of the media with a fetish for diaspora narratives and a poor grasp of geography would like.

It’s not that the vaccine is another example of minorities being targeted, it’s an example of where the govt say “trust us” and minority groups have a bit more historical awareness where the govt said that and lied.

I mean, I'm white, and I'm pretty sure that they are, but I could forgive a black person for not being so sure.

The Tuskegee experiment happened because the black population was essentially powerless to fight back, perhaps coupled with a feeling of contempt from the ruling class towards them as a people group. Power preys on weakness.

Fast forward to the current day, and although white populations have more power than black populations on average, the ruling elite has a total asymmetrical power advantage over both populations. Therefore, they are able to experiment upon the entire population without much repercussion.

Black people understand powerlessness from their history, and therefore they know to be on guard (more hesitant). White people are less familiar with powerlessness, and can be caught off guard (less hesitant).

I don't think that's fair. I find Bruenig's analysis reductive. It doesn't even look at Black vaccine hesitancy over time, which a halfway decent analysis would have done. What you see is that there is high hesitancy early on, and that hesitancy drops faster than many other groups as time progresses. It could be the case that skepticism, given the history of healthcare and the Black community, drove initial hesitancy, and then that waned as people saw millions of others do just fine. Bruenig's analysis would entirely miss that.

He also takes a huge leap in equating skepticism of healthcare more broadly in the Black community with skepticism of the vaccine in particular. There are so, so many assumptions he is just completely skating past here. E.g., it could entirely be the case that there is broad skepticism of healthcare in the Black community at all educational levels because of issues that persist to this very day (e.g. it's pretty well known that many people working in healthcare believe Black people are less susceptible to physical pain than white people). So, it's entirely plausible that you can start with a higher level of skepticism with respect to anything healthcare related within the Black community (e.g. because of both historical and/or current problems), but see decreasing vaccine hesitancy as education levels increase (e.g. because that correlates with better understanding of the vaccines and the trials it goes through). All of this would be entirely consistent with the data Bruenig presents, but would be entirely inconsistent with his conclusions.

What I am fundamentally getting at is that his analysis is reductive, and could potentially be explained by scenarios that are 100% counter to his conclusion.

If you were to ask the other big demographic, they'll tend to come up with all kinds of reasons such as "the vaccine is new and hasn't been tested enough" and the like. But at the end of the day, they are biased against it because others in their peer group are against it (or because they feel pressured by "the other side"). This is obvious due to the strong correlation to political leanings.

But they try to intellectualize it to be some other reason. They may not be lying, but they may not understand why they had a tendency to be averse to vaccination.

It is not about surveying everyone.

Remember the tshirt : "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you."

Edit: Correction: As crackercrews pointed out, I wrote "negatively correlated", when I should have written "positively correlated".

It would also be helpful if he didn't limit it to people aged 30-50. What do the rates look like outside of this band?

Trump and the GOP have heavily pushed covid into the political sphere. The right wing has worked relentlessly to frame the pandemic in the most political frame possible.

To try to pull some kind of 'well its really all sides' or 'all politicians <whatever>' that is doing a disservice to the truth of history.

There's a major difference between 'not wanting to cause a panic' and the total lies and abdication that characterize the early messages out of the Trump admin - think circa Feb/March 2020.

That's grossly overstating it.

Whites make up 78% of all employed people, and 72.5% of all healthcare and social assistance workers. They also make up more than 62% of workers in every single subcategory of "healthcare and human assistance". That does not strike me as even remotely under-represented enough that vaccination of healthcare workers could be seen as "whites experimenting on minorities" - not when most healthcare workers are white.

Let me put it this way: 17.4% of healthcare and social assistance workers are black. Meaning that for every one black worker that got vaccinated, more than four white workers would be vaccinated. In what way is it reasonable to see that as "whites treating minorities as guinea pigs"?

Source for employment figures: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat18.htm

Edit: If we also look at the "front-line worker who works at target, walmart, grocery stores, etc.", that would correspond to the "Supermarkets and other grocery (except convenience) stores" and "Convenience stores" categories, which are 78.4% and 72.1% white, respectively.