Page 20 - Florida Sentinel 10-9-20

COVID-19 And African Americans
connected to CDC.gov), Blacks are 2.4 times more likely to die than Whites; Latinos and Native Indians are dying at 1.5 times the rate.
This disproportionate ef- fect on racial and ethnic American populations fur- ther spotlights the stench of health inequities that have befallen our country for decades, if not centuries (Smedley BD, Stith AY, Nel- son AR, eds. Unequal Treat- ment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. : National Acad- emies Press (US); 2003).
Vaccine Development
In the midst of the cur- rent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, this is a moment that now de- mands that the entire health- care system – (patients, healthcare providers and in- stitutions, public officials, and insurers) – all imple- ment actions to drastically slow the death rate and the potentially lasting deleterious health effects of this virus.
During the past several
months, a focus on vaccine development to combat the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has reached a feverish pitch. The United States’ enhanced SARS-CoV-2 vaccine creation initiative, known as Opera- tion Warp Speed, is focused on public-private partner- ships with biotechnology pharmaceutical companies for COVID-19 vaccine devel- opment. As the name implies, the goal of this initiative is very rapid vaccine develop- ment.
Commonly, new vaccine development can take any- where from 5 – 10 years; the effort here is to develop a COVID-19 vaccine in approx- imately 9 months. While this seems quite expedient, much of this work actually began 15 years earlier during the orig- inal SARS-CoV outbreak in 2005. SARS-CoV (2005) was highly lethal, but not nearly as infectious (WHO Consen- sus document – (SARS) – 2003).
While the SARS-CoV (2005) vaccine development initiatives greatly slowed dur- ing the past 15 years, the sci- entific platforms that were developed helped launch the current world-wide race to create a vaccine.
Many individuals may ask themselves, “Do I risk receiv- ing a vaccine, or risk catching the virus?” With the deadly potential for COVID-19, or even the risk of long-term bodily injury by this novel Coronavirus, I implore every- one to strongly consider re- ceiving an eventually approved vaccine that has undergone the appropriate FDA approval process.
Here are my reasons.
Updates On The Current Coronavirus Research
Clinical Trials
There are SARS-CoV-2 vaccine clinical trials emerg- ing across the United States, and the globe. To date, no deaths directly attributed to the vaccine have been docu- mented in the current clinical trials; there have been mostly mild to modest adverse ef- fects documented for patients during the clinical trials (pain at injection site, elevated temperature, etc.).
More serious adverse ef- fects have been noted in sev- eral phases of the trials; the numbers of these more seri- ous effects have been very low when compared to the number of people that have received the test vaccinations worldwide.
Continual reviews of pos- sible adverse effects for all companies administering vaccine in clinical studies are conducted by their respective independent Data and Safety Monitoring Boards (DSMB) to determine if these chal- lenges were due to the vac- cine.
With tens of thousands of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine doses having been given worldwide thus far in clinical trials, there is growing observa- tional evidence that the vac- cines are at least not producing widespread seri- ous adverse effects.
Now, more clinical trial research is needed to confirm the safety profiles of all of the various types of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines being developed, while simultaneously pro- ducing evidence that they will protect the user from devel- oping COVID (Coronavirus disease).
(To Be Continued – ‘Taking A Chance To Live’)
Coronavirus Background
Greater than 200,000 Americans have died as a re- sult of being infected by the novel Coronavirus (SARS- CoV-2) as of late September, 2020. The first confirmed case in the United States oc- curred on January 20, 2020 (N Engl J Med 2020; 382:929-936).
According to the Univer- sity of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Eval- uation (IHME), the projected number of Americans that may die from Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) by No- vember 1, 2020 is greater than 229,000
(covid19.healthdata.org Ac- cessed Sep 20, 2020).
COVID Affects African Americans
Unfortunately, the IHME model has proven to be fairly accurate during the duration of the national pandemic. As for the racial/ethnic mortal- ity demographics of COVID- 19, the largest percentage of the cases have been people of color, and in particular African Americans. (Yancy CW. JAMA. 2020;323(19):1891–1892; Journal of National Black Nurses Association. 31(1):1- 12, 2020 Jul).
From information posted on covidtracker.com (a link
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