How do you ask a community to trust medicine when history has given them many reasons not to?
It’s a dilemma US nurse Victoria Baptiste has to deal with every day as she travels around Baltimore County, Maryland, in a mobile clinic, administering Covid vaccines.
Over the past couple of years, one question has kept coming up, especially from her black patients. We’ve been experimented on in the past – how can we trust this treatment?
Often they’ve come across inaccurate posts on Facebook or Twitter. But her black patients’ fears have not just come from online misinformation – their mistrust began long ago.
“When they start to tell their stories they say, ‘Remember Tuskegee and Henrietta Lacks, they always experiment on people of colour,'” she says.