Uncut Interview- Vaccine Hesitancy: A Rights Based Approach for the Most Vulnerable

The following is the full uncut interview with Dr. Olajide Williams. Portions of his interview were featured in our recent episode "Building Public Trust For Public Health". The episode is currently airing on Public Television or you can watch it at our website or on YouTube. Subscribe to this podcast if you've yet to do so to Download the episode.

The Covid-19 vaccine has emergency FDA approval, but how effective will it be if there is no public trust in our public health system? In this exclusive interview, Columbia University professor and neurologist Dr. Olajide Williams offers one solution to fill this gaping trust deficit — culturally adapted message science. He is the founder of Hip Hop Public Health, which employs music and culturally-tailored media to improve health literacy and transform health outcomes for vulnerable communities. He argues the only way to develop public trust is to bring the people to the table. Public health officials must fully recognize the harm done to Black and brown bodies, from forced sterilizations to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the impact it’s had on collective memory.

"If we do not get this right, we are not going to defeat this ‘vaccine hesitancy’ surrounding this virus, and we will have great inequities persist because they don’t trust the process — and no one has tried to penetrate their minds in a way that they trust and in a way that they can embrace. That’s why it’s important to have a ‘rights based’ approach to vaccine distribution." — Dr. Olajide Williams