#TakeTheVaccine Campaign Fights Disinformation

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So let me read some of these stats. This is open safely Oxford University study. 70 to 79-year-olds in the U.K. have received the vaccine. Now among whites, 86%, South Asians, 73%, mixed heritage 68% and black 55%, so there really is a statistical, you know, I mean, its right there. You can see how much lower the take up is. And even SAGE, the government advisers, say trust is important for black communities. They have low trust in health care organizations and research findings due to historical issues of unethical health care research. Talk us through some of that.

DAVID OLUSOGA, PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER: Well, I think one of the other effects of social media has been that information, whether it`s false or true, travels rapidly around the world. And those who are spreading misinformation are doubly empowered when they are in the position to point to real, verifiable historical incidents and use them to suggest that they prove that the medical profession or the governments or that the manufacturers of vaccines are opposed or don`t have the interests of non-white communities at heart. Now their messages are false. These are — these are conspiracy theories, these are — this is misinformation, but it is weaponizing real historical events. And so more and more people are aware of these historical tragedies, like the Tuskegee incident, the study in 20th century America which was supposedly, as it was sold to those who took part, a study of the treatment of syphilis in African-American men. In reality, what was happening was that doctors were studying the effects of that disease without treating those African-American men, and then examining their bodies. Now, that was an appalling abuse of power by the medical profession, which carried on until the 1970s. We mustn`t forget that last year, in 2020, two French doctors made the public suggestion that the right thing to do would be to test the then emerging coronavirus vaccines on Africans in Africa, that Africa was somehow a continent in which the people could be used as guinea pigs in medical experiments. So if that can be said last year, it`s not difficult for people who are spreading misinformation to point to those incidents and use them to try and persuade black and brown people in the U.K. and elsewhere that the vaccine isn`t for them, the governments and the medical profession don`t have their best interests at heart.