With painstaking effort, Black doctors’ group takes aim at Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy
In September, after the Food and Drug Administration authorized Covid-19 treatments based more on presidential puffery than on clinical data, some physicians decided to take matters into their own hands.
Specifically, the National Medical Association, a professional society of African American doctors, formed its own in-house FDA to vet the data when the official one seemed not to be. At first, the task force was framed as a stand-in — another instance in the long history of Black leaders stepping in where the government had failed. And eventually, its members did review the results and endorse the emergency authorizations for both the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines.
