Fauci says the COVID-19 vaccine rollout needs to prioritize people of color

• Dr. Anthony Fauci on Wednesday urged fairness in the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
• Data indicates Black Americans are more likely to get COVID-19 but less likely to be vaccinated.
• Fauci pointed to geographic inequality and discussed why some mistrusted the US medical industry.

In an interview with the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci said the COVID-19 vaccine rollout must account for the coronavirus' disproportionate impact on people of color.

Black people in the US and the UK have been far more likely than white people to get COVID-19 - twice as likely in one large study - yet so far they are receiving vaccines at much lower rates than white people in many states.

In 16 US states that have released vaccination data by race, white people are being vaccinated at as much as three times the rates as Black people, according to Axios.

"I think that's the one thing we really got to be careful of," Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as well as the president's chief medical advisor, said in the interview. "We don't want in the beginning that most of the people who are getting it are otherwise, well, middle-class white people."

But Fauci said he understood and respected why some people of color were hesitant to get vaccinated.

Many point to the infamous Tuskegee experiment as reason for their skepticism of the US health system. In 1932, scientists began monitoring 400 Black men with syphilis but did not treat them for the disease or even tell them they had it. The study was conducted without the patients' informed consent and lasted nearly four decades.

"They keep coming back and saying the history of Tuskegee," Fauci said of minority groups, adding: "They don't, can't, and should not forget about it, because it happened and it was shameful."

Fauci said a direct repeat of Tuskegee was essentially impossible given safeguards that had been added to the medical field but emphasized that health officials needed to make that clear to people of color.

"You really want to get it to the people who are really the most vulnerable," Fauci said. "You want to get it to everybody, but you don't want to have a situation where people who really are in need of it, because of where they are, where they live, what their economic status is, that they don't have access to the vaccine."