Native Americans Resist the COVID-19 Vaccines (2021)

Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. Native Americans have been among the hardest hit by COVID-19, but a history of medical mistreatment led some indigenous leaders to brace for challenges in vaccinating their communities. Special correspondent Fred De Sam Lazaro reports on those efforts. On a frigid morning in Minneapolis, a sign of progress in the fight against COVID-19. Inside a former Dollar Tree store, residents waited for doses of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine. The effort was run by the Native American Community Clinic, which serves thousands of indigenous people in the area. Although native lands are predominantly in very remote settings, the majority of native peoples in the United States actually lives in cities. This South Minneapolis neighborhood has one of the densest urban native populations and is a concerted effort to vaccinate the elderly.

Still like 67-year-old Elsie Budrow, an enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, she spent most of her life going back and forth between Minneapolis and the reservation in northern Minnesota. That is, until the pandemic hit. Everybody's kind of keeping to themselves, which is very hard because in the Native community, you share a lot with your family, and that hasn't been able to happen. So when Budrow found out she could get the vaccine, she leapt at the opportunity. I'm like everybody else kind of scared of it, but my own common sense tells me that it's safe to get it, and it's going to help in the pandemic. Nationwide indigenous people have experienced the highest death rate from COVID-19, nearly twice the rate of white Americans. That's partly because native people have higher incidents of diabetes, heart disease, and asthma, conditions related to poverty that can exacerbate a coronavirus infection.

Anthony Stately is the executive director of the Native American Community Clinic or NACC. Establishing herd immunity, getting 70-80% of our population vaccinated is going to be really, really important. Many communities are losing their elders. Those are the people that hold the knowledge of our culture and our language, things that are really important to us, that are as important to our health and well-being as is medicine, as is food, as is water, and all those other things. Stately has tried to spread the word about the vaccine on a Native American radio show. The difference between taking the vaccine and not taking the vaccine at all is that, you know, if you take the vaccine, you have some percentage of chance of being immune to it or to have some protection. It's personal for Stately, who was hospitalized with COVID. The first night I got there, I just cried because it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks that I had to say goodbye to my children. I didn't know if I was going to get home. At the end of December, NACC held a small ceremony where it vaccinated its first group of community

elders, hoping to infuse the medicine with good spirit and protect their people. But for Stately, the vaccination push comes with a challenge. Native people, we have this long history of not being treated very well by the medical establishment and the research community. And so I expected that elder people would be ambivalent about accepting the vaccine. That described Stately's cousin Roxanne Flamond, who stopped by recently for a visit. I'm going to Phoenix. You are? Dang, in the middle of a pandemic, no less. How are you going to pull it off? I'm going to wear two masks and a shield. So you don't think you might want to take the vaccine before you go or? No. No, that's not going to happen. Flamond, who's 67 and has underlying health conditions, is concerned about having an allergic reaction to the shot, a side-effect scene and a relatively small number of cases with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

In the beginning, I had conspiracy theories, you know, and I said, I'm going to wait until everybody to see what everybody else does, and if they're dropping my flies, I'm not getting it, you know. But also the fact that, you know, our historically, you know, the government has not really treated our people, you know, fairly. In the 1970s, the Federal Indian Health Service sterilized thousands of indigenous women without their permission or after coercing them. Roxanne Flamond says she was one of those women. I was coerced in signing papers to be sterilized, and I didn't know. I was 19. I believe what the doctor said. The history also includes the abuse of Native Americans in scientific research, and it dates back all the way to the 1700s when British colonizers gave tribes blankets contaminated with smallpox. So when Flamond first heard about the COVID vaccines, I was like, well, is this another

smallpox infested blanket just in a different form? For providers in indigenous communities, a big task now is convincing patients that the government's response this time is appropriate. Dr. Mary Owen is president of the Association of American Indian Physicians. We recognize as Native physicians that degree of distrust in our communities, and we recognize the reasons for most of us having lived in and continuing to work in our communities. However, it is so important that people recognize that we are dying at much higher numbers and the government is actually getting this one right by getting us the vaccine as they should be. So in order to continue to protect our communities that are dying, our community members who are dying at disproportionate amounts, we have to take this vaccine up. The effort from Owen and others may be working. A recent survey by the Urban Indian Health Institute found 75 percent of American Indians and Alaska natives are willing to get the vaccine.

Encouraging as that acceptance is, the challenge as in so many other communities will continue to be getting enough vaccine and getting it across the vast varied landscape of Indian country. Meantime, Anthony Stately was relieved to learn that by the end of their short meeting,