Speaking at the Bloomberg Equality Summit on Wednesday, top government infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci again highlighted the COVID-19 pandemic's disproportionate impacts on minority populations in the United States. That's not genetic. That's our society. As Fauci told his audience, American minority groups both are more likely to hold "essential" jobs than white Americans and have higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, and other diet-related, poverty-related health issues. "There's almost a double whammy on the minority populations," said Fauci.
With that in mind, Fauci again urged companies to gain representative samples of Black Americans and other nonwhite groups in late-stage vaccine tests. "We have to do much, much better with the relative percentage of African Americans that are in the trial."
"We want to be able to say with confidence that they are safe and effective in all demographic groups. You can make an assumption that they are, but we want to prove it."
Fauci has been urging companies to ensure representative testing for weeks now, asking them to overrepresent Black Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans in their vaccine trial demographics to better match actual infection rates. This helped lead to Moderna slightly slowing the enrollment process for its own clinical trial to try to recruit more nonwhite participants after dismal early numbers; the National Institutes of Health is funding television ads trying to boost Black and Latino participation.
If you are able and interested, you can register for current or planned COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials here.