In his last tweet, Hank Aaron sent a message to black Americans that the coronavirus vaccine is safe.
“I was proud to receive the COVID-19 vaccine earlier today at Morehouse School of Medicine,” he wrote on Twitter on January 5th. “I hope you do the same!”
After Aaron died at 86 on Friday, some skeptics and advocates pinned against the tweet to spread misinformation about the vaccine.
The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office said Monday that Aaron, who is considered one of the greatest players in baseball history, died of natural causes.
But that did not stop people from doing proposal otherwise on social media, also on the audio-only app Clubhouse. On Twitter, anti-vaccination activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. written that Aaron’s death ‘part of a wave of suspicious deaths“related to the vaccine.
Peter Hotez, a professor of pediatrics and molecular biology and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, predicted this would happen.
“I’m terribly saddened by the loss of Hank Aaron, one of my most important child heroes,” Hotez tweeted Friday. “Meanwhile, I’m getting ready for the setback of those who will try to exploit it and try to attribute its death to a #covid vaccination. “
Hotez, the author of “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism,” said it was the “modus operandi” of anti-vaxxers.
“They are opportunists,” he said in an interview Monday. “They will try to look after everything they can.”
They also specifically tried to target African Americans with their messages, he said.
“So this species was two birds with one stone in front of it,” Hotez said, referring to Aaron’s death.
Aaron made the public vaccination with other civil rights leaders in Georgia this month to reassure and encourage black Americans, many of whom experts do not trust coronavirus vaccines, to do the same.
Dr Carlos del Rio, executive co-dean of the Emory University School of Medicine, said the public nature of Aaron’s decision is a double-edged sword.
“We are disclosing his vaccination so that it can be used to increase the vaccination,” del Rio said Monday. “Unfortunately, because his vaccination was made public and when he died, we now have a bit of a boomerang effect in which it’s going to haunt us because he’s dead.”
But in reality, del Rio said he “has complete confidence that his death has nothing to do with the vaccine and that it has to do with the fact that he was old and debilitated.”
Del Rio said the coronavirus vaccines are safe and effective and prevent people from dying from the deadly virus that has killed more than 400,000 people in the US.
Both Hotez and del Rio said one fact that they believe many people are missing is that nearly 2 million Americans over the age of 65 die annually.
“If you vaccinate a large number of people over the age of 65, a number are going to die from non-vaccine-related causes,” Hotez said. “So it’s important to explain it.”
It is worth remembering, Del Rio said that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the majority of people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. by January 16 were people 65 years and older.
“I’d rather have the vaccine than have Covid,” del Rio said.
Sandra Lindsay, a critical care nurse in Jamaica who was the first person in New York to receive the vaccine, said mistrust in the Black community stems from harmful practices from the past, such as the Tuskegee study in which U.S. health workers left syphilis untreated . Black men without their permission to analyze the consequences. Lindsay said the patients, including children, regularly refer to the study.
“People are going back to it,” Lindsay said in an interview Monday. “We know it was harmful and inhuman and painful and painful.”
Lindsay said she was among the first to take the coronavirus vaccine at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, where she is the director of critical care nursing, because she wants to inspire ‘people who want to inspire like me’.
“When people talk to me about their fears, I never dismiss them,” Lindsay, 52, said. ‘I’m a black woman. And I know what happened in the past, and that’s something I had to struggle with. ‘
Since the beginning of the pandemic, some black celebrities have encountered because they pushed unfounded conspiracies about the coronavirus to a population with a lot of mistrust in medical research.
R&B singer Keri Hilson has been widely criticized for falsely posting the coronavirus on social media in March last year. Daarna Hilson said this at the request of her management, she deleted videos and articles that she helped raise and that the virus, whatever its cause, is a real thing. ‘And in December, singer and actor Tyrese Gibson was criticized for writing in an Instagram post that one of his secrets to staying Covid-free is sleeping 90 degrees every night. The World Health Organization said: “Exposing you to the sun or to temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius (75 degrees Fahrenheit) does not prevent or cure COVID-19.”
Lindsay believes that health workers and others in the medical community are responsible for educating people and addressing their concerns about the vaccines.
“Encourage them to ask questions,” she said. “Involve them and teach them to dispel some of these conspiracy theories.”