"Re-thinking Race and Vaccine Hesitancy"
Much has been made of so-called [COVID-19] vaccine hesitancy among African Americans. Scholars and pundits alike have attempted to explain this hesitancy by pointing to mistrust of medical institutions, either as a result of historical racial injustice or as an effect of continuing racial injustice. However, I argue that not only does “mistrust” fail to adequately explain the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, but the question itself is wrong-headed because it implicitly fails to take African Americans seriously as rational agents. Rather, taking structural injustice seriously requires re-thinking the assumptions that underlie vaccine distribution.
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Department of Philosophy