Surgeon General Adams says he understands why Farrakhan, others in black community wary of vaccine

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said Thursday he understands why Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan would compare the coronavirus vaccine to "toxic waste,” considering the medical-science community’s past, problematic history with black-Americans.

“It is because they have an incredibly deep level of distrust of the system, and that distrust comes from real places of historical harms that were done to African American communities,” Adams said on “Just the News AM.”

He spoke several days after Farrakhan warned followers not to get the vaccine.

“They gave free shots of toxic waste," Farrakhan said, apparently referring to a plan to give Americans $1,500 to get the vaccine.

"How could you allow him to stick a needle into you, saying he’s helping you?," Farrakhan also said in an online speech for the National Afrikan-Black Leadership Summit.

Adams, in pointing out the concerns of the black community, on Monday referred to the Tuskegee syphilis study that started in 1932 and used black men to observe untreated syphilis.

“Not too long ago, they were experimenting on African American men, deny them treatments that could have prevented complications,” Adams, who is black, told show host Carrie Sheffield.  

He said that after the Tuskegee incident independent review boards and other safeguards have been put in place “to ensure that those harms never, ever, ever occur again.”

Adams also said he and others are working with leaders in the black community to give them the facts about this vaccine, “so that they can spread it to the people who will listen to them."

He also said that he’ll get the vaccine Friday as a message to the black community that the shot is safe and effective.