Walter M. Kimbrough thought the letter, like his other messages nudging students to do things, wouldn’t get much response. Instead, it stirred up what Kimbrough called a “hornet’s nest.”
Earlier this month, Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University, and C. Reynold Verret, the president of Xavier University of Louisiana, issued a public letter announcing that they were participating in a Covid-19 vaccine trial. Kimbrough and Verret, both leaders of private, historically Black universities in New Orleans, encouraged their students, faculty, staff, and alumni to consider participating in the same trial or others like it.
“Our communities have been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, with harrowing consequences for the lives and health of our fellow citizens,” they wrote. “It is of the utmost importance that a significant number of Black and brown subjects participate so that the effectiveness of these vaccines be understood across the many diverse populations that comprise these United States.”
The presidents’ letter acknowledged that African Americans’ trust in the medical establishment had been eroded by a long history of unethical research on their communities, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which Black men were denied treatment so researchers could study the trajectory of the disease. Verret and Kimbrough stressed that modern regulations guarded against such abuses.
Their message was in line with others from HBCU leaders and the Congressional Black Caucus. But their letter, because it was aimed in part at students, provoked outrage.
The HBCU leaders should not put students forward as experimental “lab rats,” parents, alumni, and others fumed in a torrent of social media comments that generated headlines in the local press. A prominent economist said they had contributed to the excessive recruitment of Black people for trials. Leaders of a Black church political group demanded that Kimbrough and Verret “immediately disclose if they are being paid to urge students to participate in the trials.”
The vitriol was such that Kimbrough and Verret emailed a follow-up statement attesting that participation in trials is voluntary and “neither institution or president is receiving any form of compensation.”
Kimbrough discussed the controversy, and what he’s learned from it, with The Chronicle in a phone interview last week.
How are you feeling?
Good. I haven’t had any adverse reactions at all. I had my annual physical a couple of weeks ago. And I was telling my doctor I’m doing this vaccine trial. He thinks I got the placebo.
Tell me about the Covid-19 vaccine trial that you’re participating in, and how and why you came to participate.
This is the Pfizer trial. And the president of Xavier called me, and he said, “Hey, I’m participating in one of these trials, would you be interested?” And I was like, you know what, I’ve actually been thinking about doing that. He said then we could share to our campus communities we’re doing this and get other people to think about participating.
What motivated you to co-write a letter urging others to participate in vaccine trials?
The letter was to tell people to consider participating. It’s not to tell them to do it. There aren’t enough African Americans participating in the trials. And the vaccine makers are saying we won’t know if the vaccine works for African Americans if you don’t have enough people in the trial.
One of the examples I told people is that the disease lupus overwhelmingly impacts Black women. You wouldn’t want some treatment for lupus that is built upon white women. So if you have a disease like Covid that overwhelmingly impacts African Americans, you need some African Americans in the trial to make sure it works.
What did you learn from the backlash to your letter?
The main thing I learned is that people don’t read everything, and they selectively read so that it fits a narrative. It’s a reflection of the times. The vaccine development has been politicized. That’s the president’s fault. And so people don’t trust the vaccine. That’s a factor that we didn’t think about, that there is a lot of distrust of the president. And so people are skeptical, particularly for a demographic that overwhelmingly will not vote for the president.
I saw some people saying, “Well, they must be getting paid.” Or, “They cut a deal for the schools to get some money out of this.” I never even thought about that. I thought I was just trying to do something good. Maybe I was naïve. This is something I thought was important to do. And I wanted to lead by example.
To see the level of distrust has been really interesting. People in government — they should be paying attention. It’s going to delay us getting past this if people don’t have any faith in government to deliver a working vaccine.
Critics’ key point seemed to be that, knowing the history of medical exploitation of Black people, HBCU leaders should not offer up their students as “guinea pigs” for experimentation in potentially unsafe trials. What’s your response?
That’s not what the letter said. People saw vaccine trial. And student. They didn’t read faculty, staff, and alumni. They didn’t read consider, which we used twice. Sometimes people just look for things to have outrage about. Thank God for Kanye [West], because Kanye comes up and gives somebody else something to be outraged about.
Our students would know that we aren’t going around pressuring people. It was just an idea that we put out there for people to consider.
Are presidents of any predominantly white institutions encouraging their students to participate? Many of your critics were resentful that you suggested Black students participate at this early stage.
I don’t know of any. When I went for my second visit, I actually had a chance to meet the lead researcher here who’s doing the Pfizer trial. She said we already get students from Tulane that are participating. She said that’s not an issue. The Tulane student population is not mostly Black. Why ask a president of a school that’s 5-percent Black to ask their students to participate? That doesn’t solve the problem.
The medical system conducting the trial in which you are encouraging students to enroll was the subject of a recent ProPublica investigation. The article described how patients infected with Covid-19 were sent “back into communities to die at home, and be cared for by untrained family members without the proper protective equipment.” Were you aware of that?
No, because that article came out after I started the trial. But I think that’s a part of the challenge. Those organizations can’t make those kinds of mistakes because that only erodes the trust. To have that kind of thing come out, to have the kinds of messages that come from the president, all of that works against having diverse people participate. And in the end, Black people lose. If everybody’s afraid to participate, we lose.
Is there anything else you want to add?
People feel like we have a magical power as presidents, that if we say something students are gonna actually do it. If that were true, you wouldn’t have these massive outbreaks of Covid at these big schools. I can’t get all students to create a LinkedIn account or to do an internship, and those things are critical. So why does anybody think a college student is going to participate in a vaccine trial that might last up to 26 months? Do they think people are gonna just run out because I said, hey, it’s something you should think about doing? That’s nonsensical.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
