An infectious diseases physician addressed a group of people online saying that many Black people in North America are mistrustful of the COVID-19 vaccine for reasons that are rooted in the history of health issues in the African diaspora.

“We are worried about being guinea pigs or worried about the harm this vaccine could cause. But we do have good grounds to be mistrustful of the medical system, the government and the vaccine itself, because we have a history of being mistreated. We have a history of experimentation and exploitation,” said Dr. David Haase, who is now a retired physician.

Haase was joined on Friday evening by a number of speakers, including Dr. Gaynor Watson-Creed, Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health for Nova Scotia, and Lisa Colley, a health-care worker at Northwood — a long-term care facility in Halifax — to discuss the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine and separate fact from fiction.

This was done on Zoom as part of the Health Association of African Canadians’ first ‘African Nova Scotian COVID-19 Town Hall’ meeting.

“The aim of the town hall is to address concerns related to community mistrust in the COVID-19 vaccine, the response by government and Public Health, and health-care system overall,” said Sharon Davis-Murdoch, founding member and co-president of the Health Association of African Canadians.

The Health Association of African Canadians (HAAC) was formed in 2000 to address African Canadian health issues and the systemic inequities affecting health.

Dr. Haase said the misuse of Black people in the medical system and in health care goes back to the time of slavery.“Enslaved people were used for medical experiments, surgical experiments, many of them [ended up] with adverse health outcomes and even death in some instances,” he said.

But one of the most notable instance of exploitation was the Tuskegee syphilis study that started in 1932 in the U.S., said Dr. Haase.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one of the major operating components of the Department of Health and Human Services in the United States, the study initially involved 600 Black men – 399 with syphilis and 201 who did not have the disease.

The CDC said the study was conducted without the benefit of patients’ informed consent. Researchers told the men they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several ailments, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue. In truth, they did not receive the proper treatment needed to cure their illness.

“In exchange for taking part in the study, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance. Although originally projected to last 6 months, the study actually went on for 40 years,” explains the CDC on their website.

More recently in Toronto, Haase said that when it came to the screening of Black women for breast and cervical cancer, there was a lack of health data.

“It’s medical racism, and it still goes on to this day,” he said.

Haase applauded the work of Kizzmekia Corbett, an American immunologist at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who has been instrumental in developing the Moderna vaccine.

He also praised Sandra Lindsay, an ICU nurse and the first American to receive Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine.

“She decided that she’s going to step up and be the first to be injected with this vaccine,” Haase said.

In Halifax, N.S., Lisa Colley, a health-care worker at Northwood, stepped up to get the vaccine after initially not wanting to take it.

“I wasn’t sure if I should take it, especially hearing all of the different negative things about the vaccine,” Colley said, but she changed her mind and took the vaccine after she weighed the pros and cons.

“I was really afraid not to take it because I have a granddaughter who has cystic fibrosis — a lung disease — and if she contracted the coronavirus, it could be deadly,” Colley said.

Once she received the first dose, she said that about three days later she started to feel chilly, like she was coming down with something, but then that subsided, and once she received her second dose she had no symptoms or side effects whatsoever.

“I just want to encourage everyone to take it. We come from a close-knit community. I’m from North Preston and I reside in Cherrybrook and, I know we mistrust health care and we have every right to,” said Colley.

“But we want to get back to normal, we want our lives to come back to the way it used to be … COVID-19 has been a big impact on the Black community, especially the Christian community … It is affecting us emotionally, socially, physically,” she added.

Colley hopes that community members will consider taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

For the sake of length, Global did not cover the full discussion and what each speaker spoke about at the ‘African Nova Scotian COVID-19 Town Hall’ meeting, but people can listen to the full discussion here.

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TORONTO — After their youngest son Isaiah was diagnosed with autism at age four, Sherron and Clovis Grant started attending support groups in the Greater Toronto Area for parents of children with disabilities.

However, they were often the only Black parents in the room and Sherron said that the cultural barriers were getting in the way of non-Black parents in the group understanding what they were going through.

“The information was there, but just being able to share experiences and know that if I ask certain questions that other people are able to understand where I’m coming from,” Sherron said in an interview with CTV’s Your Morning on Thursday.

“I wasn’t able to connect with other families on that level in the groups because I was the only one usually that was Black in those groups.”

The Grants’ joined parenting support groups to help combat this, but found that the groups didn’t address anti-Black racism and other issues specific to Black culture. The couple says the experience inspired them to create a support group specifically for Black parents and caregivers of children and adults with disabilities.

Clovis noted that because Isaiah is Black, he will find himself in certain situations that other, non-Black children with autism will not be in, such as being watched by security while shopping at a store. He said these are just some of the issues their support group works to address.

Sherron said that since autism is often an “invisible disability,” few people including those in their family and church, knew how to respond, often dismissing Isaiah’s autism as a lack of discipline from the parents.

“When we’d have family get-togethers and Isaiah would be acting up in a certain way, we would be criticized that we weren’t being strong enough parents, that we weren’t giving him enough structure, that we were spoiling him,” she said.

Sherron said she understands it was just a “lack of knowledge” about autism from others that brought about this criticism, but it started to impact them as parents.

“It’s a lack of understanding what we’re going through, and it can make you feel isolated alone and maybe make you feel like you are being a bad parent,” Sherron said.

Clovis says their support group meets on the second Tuesday of every month and participants can connect online via Zoom. While the group isn’t focused on a specific disability, attendants must be Black.

More than 30 parents attended the first meeting and about 40 attended the second one, according to Clovis.

Clovis said the turnout of the first meeting was “very surprising” in terms of numbers and engagement from the parents.

“They are very open with their lives, and they want mentorship, they want their journeys to be shared, they want to learn from each other and they want resources,” Clovis said.

“We’re obviously touching a nerve,” he added.

Clovis said the response to their support group has been so great, they already have meetings scheduled up until June 2021.

However, their support group hasn’t just caught the attention of Black families in Ontario. Sherron said she has heard from parents in the United States, Jamaica and South Africa looking to join the meetings.

When it is safe to do so, the couple said they want to use a hybrid of in-person and virtual meetings so people from across Canada and the world can join. Sherron said she would like to see their support group have a physical space for meetings in the future.

“We live in the Scarborough area and compared to other parts of the city, there seems to be a little less services available for us so I’d love to see us have a space where families can come together and meet and connect,” Sherron said.

Sherron said she also hopes their meetings inspire Black parents in other provinces to start their own chapters of the support group.

Those looking to join the Grants’ support group can email them at BPSGroup2020@gmail.com.

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Canada must dismantle anti-Black racism in health care to address its harmful effects on people’s health, argue authors of a commentary in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal)

Racism has significant negative effects on the physical and mental health of Black people and people of non-dominant racial groups. For example, there have been significantly higher death rates from COVID-19 among Black people in North America and the United Kingdom.

Anti-Black racism also exists in the medical system, with stereotyping and bias by health care providers and the underrepresentation of Black physicians.

First, we who work in health care must acknowledge the existence of anti-Black racism in our systems and commit to meaningful, sustained change. We can do this by listening to the voices of Black Canadians, patients and health care professionals who have been grappling with anti-Black racism for generations, and by engaging with the many communities that have made recommendations for meaningful change to address the problem.”

Drs. OmiSoore Dryden, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, & Onye Nnorom, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Study Co-Leads of Canada’s Black Health Education Collaborative

They recommend anti-racism training for health care providers, collecting race-based data in partnership with specific communities, addressing anti-Black racism in medical schools and the health system, and increasing accessibility and admission for Black students.

“The field of medicine can no longer deny or overlook the existence of systemic anti-Black racism in Canada and how it affects the health of Black people and communities. It is time to acknowledge and commit to dismantling systemic racism within our institutions of care and education,” they argue.Source:

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Aisha Addo was having a talk just the other day with a close friend about how they were faring as the pandemic stretched into 2021.

She said her friend spoke candidly about feeling like she was falling into a state of depression and being unable to pull herself out of it.

“We’re all experiencing the same things — some people more intensely than others,” said Addo, who founded the non-profit Power To Girls Foundation.

New polling from Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies suggests some Canadians feel their mental health has declined as the pandemic has rolled on, with the impacts potentially striking women, single parents, the unemployed, relatively recent immigrants and racialized people more than others.

The survey shows female respondents were more likely than men to report their mental health as bad or very bad across a range of age groups, but especially between the ages of 18 and 34 years old.

Rates of worsening mental health were also high for single parents in the survey, with 40 per cent describing their mental health as bad or very bad.

Tanya Hayles, founder of the global group Black Moms Connection, said many parents are feeling stretched by having to work from home while overseeing virtual learning. She said a further burden for Black parents are issues of systemic racism.

“This pandemic has adversely affected women more than men and it’s women who are leaving the workforce altogether to make sure that their children have what they need,” she said.

“If you’re a single parent, there are no breaks.”

Jack Jedwab, president of the Association for Canadian Studies, said mental health might worsen with new lockdowns and restrictions as people lose the outlet of visiting friends and family. Some respondents in the survey said they did that over the holidays.

“It’s a very significant challenge for governments that are introducing lockdowns and curfews to not see the mental health side of this crisis get exacerbated,” Jedwab said.

The online survey was conducted Jan. 2-3 with 1,523 respondents. It can’t be assigned a margin of error because web panels are not considered random samples of the population.

The results mirror findings from earlier on in the pandemic when women reported feeling more worried than men about COVID-19 as they began taking on added care duties for children and aging parents, and lost their jobs at a faster rate than men, said Andrea Gunraj, vice-president of public engagement at the Canadian Women’s Foundation.

Another factor at play is the increased risk for gender-based violence that predominantly targets women, she said.

“This picture of increased violence, and increased stresses in caregiving and housework, that intersects with the economic stresses that women uniquely have been facing,” Gunraj said.

“It tells a certain picture about women’s mental health right now … and the pandemic being a gender-pandemic at large.”

The polling analysis also looked at results for immigrants and some racialized communities, which came through reviewing six surveys by Leger involving over 9,000 respondents between Oct. 29, 2020, and Jan. 3, 2021. It too cannot be assigned a margin of error as a web-based survey.

The data suggests that 25 per cent of people who have lived in Canada for less than five years reported their mental health was bad or very bad, while 19 per cent of respondents who were born in Canada reported the same.

Nearly 27 per cent of respondents who identified as South Asian reported their mental health being at that level, while 20 per cent of those who identified as Black and about 18 per cent of those who identified as Chinese reported the same.

Even before the pandemic, there was a lack of mental health resources for minority communities, Addo said. Many relied on their community for mental health support, which has disappeared with public health requests to avoid visiting friends and family, she said.

Accessing other resources is also difficult for vulnerable populations, particularly those with children learning remotely and maybe only one computer at home, Addo said.

Addo suggested governments create a mental health fund or program to ensure people who need it have someone to speak with.

“The moment that people are left to their own devices and are left to their own thoughts, it’s easy to fall into depression, it’s easy to become more anxious, and it’s easy to feel more lonely,” she said.

Any mental health services created should be diverse, Hayles said, noting that Black Canadians are often more comfortable expressing their issues to Black therapists.

Jordan Press/The Canadian Press

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