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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 13, 2021)
January 13, 2021 The Skanner Portland & Seattle Page 5 Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Interview: Portland Physician on Coronavirus Vaccine, Reaching Out to Wary Communities Black Americans report highest levels of distrust as country distributes millions of Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines By Saundra Sorenson Of The Skanner News W ith more than 1,600 Orego- nians having lost their lives to coronavirus, and 124,000 cases reported within the state, the deliv- ery of two FDA-approved vaccinations gives hope for widespread inocula- tion and an eventual re- turn to normalcy. But experts are con- cerned that misinfor- mation and misun- derstanding about the vaccinations will un- dermine public health efforts to protect from a virus that as of Friday had infected 22 million Americans and claimed the lives of 367,000 -- es- pecially within the Black community, the hardest Dr. Carl Anderson hit by the pandemic and statistically, the most skeptical of it. While Black Ameri- cans are dying of coro- navirus at a rate of two- and-a-half times that of White Americans, fewer than half of Black Amer- ican adults intend to get the vaccine, according to a survey by the Pew Re- search Center There is significant dis- trust “in the Black and also in the Latinx and the Asian Pacific commu- nities, simply because their experiences with Western medicine, at least in the US, has not al- ways been trustworthy,” Dr. Carl Anderson, a lo- cal physician, told The Skanner. Anderson served as a preventative medicine physician in the U.S. Army Reserve for nine years, and was deployed as a preventive medicine officer in Kuwait in 2012, where he tracked the SARS-like virus during Operation Enduring Freedom. In 2016, he served as acting chief of preventive medicine at Fort Sill, Okla., moni- toring mosquito species capable of carrying the Zika virus. He sat down with The Skanner to clear up con- fusion about the vaccina- tion. Two Vaccines Approved The two vaccinations currently approved by the FDA are by Pfizer and Moderna, with each company under contract to reserve their first 100 million vaccine doses for the U.S. government, which is distributing doses in a taxpayer-fund- ed effort. A third, the AstraZeneca vaccine, is currently under review in the U.S., with OHSU conducting a clinical tri- al of at least 13,000 volun- teers. So far. 6.7 million Americans -- about 2% of the population -- have received their first dose of the vaccine, which re- quires two shots spaced out over three weeks to a month. Vaccinations are currently being ad- ministered with the most at-risk populations being prioritized, including health care providers, hospital workers, elderly care facility staff and res- idents, and anyone over the age of 80. President-elect Joe Biden this week an- nounced his goal of dis- tributing 100 million vaccinations during his first 100 days in office. On Friday, he announced he would free up all avail- See INTERVIEW on page 6
