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A very small number of indigenous people in the United States participated in COVID-19 vaccine testing, leaving questions about whether immunization will have the same effect on members of those communities.
The reasons for the underrepresentation in the exams are that they were conducted primarily in larger cities and without a special focus on indigenous tribes, as well as the negative experiences of those communities towards medical experiments in the past, AP writes.
Few of the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes have applied for studies, and their reluctance is often the result of suspicion and mistrust. Many tribes also require multiple levels of approval for clinical trials, for which scientists are not always prepared.
The Navajo tribe, wanting to make sure that the covid-19 vaccine is effective for its members, announced that they would welcome the clinical trials of the Pfizer company in its reservation that extends in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. But members of the tribe immediately accused their government of allowing them to be guinea pigs, pointing to painful times in the past when indigenous people did not consent to medical tests or were not fully informed about the procedures.
The Havasupai tribe won a lawsuit a decade ago in which they sued Arizona State University scientists for abusing blood samples intended for diabetes research to study schizophrenia and ancient population migration without permission from the tribe.
Other stories of the sterilization of Indian women, recorded in a federal report in 1976, and military testing of radioactive iodine on Alaska Natives sparked mistrust.
However, research like the one that found the first generation of bacterial meningitis vaccines to be less effective among Navajo and Apache children six months and younger reminds us of the importance of testing, writes AP. The incidence rate among these children was five to ten times higher than in the general population.
Researchers and physicians in Native American communities have also found that standard doses of medications, such as blood thinners, are not always the best for tribal members.
Additionally, a study that recently found indirectly that the HPV vaccine does not protect against the strain that is the leading cause of cancer among Indian women in the Great Plains shows how important it is to have more Indian researchers and volunteers involved in clinical trials. , concludes AP.
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