Since the start of the pandemic, there has been sufficient data showing that “communities of color are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 across the United States“. Throughout the entire pandemic, people of color have been getting sick and dying of COVID-19 at rates exponentially higher than white people and the problem only continues to worsen. People of color have also started to bring more awareness to the public on the discrimination they experience within the healthcare system as a whole stating, “they often feel that health care providers treat them differently and assume they are less educated, poor, or deserving of less respect because of their race or culture.”
Due to this, it is no surprise that the racial disparities with COVID-19 have continued with the development of the vaccine. The vaccine has gone out to mostly white people, even though minorities are the ones who seem to be effected the most. Statistically, minorities, African Americans especially, have also been known to have “higher rates of chronic health conditions like asthma, high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes than whites,” making them more susceptible to getting the worst of the virus, yet they are still not the ones receiving it.
The pharmaceutical industry is aware of this issue and has even urged companies to include a more racially and ethically diverse subject group with a goal to narrow racial health disparities, however no major changes have yet to be seen. It is crucial that the pharmaceutical companies begin to make more of an effort to implement their new “guidleines” in relation to race as the discrimination in the health care system is just one of the many battles people of color have to face everyday.
CIMA Law Group Blog 