Walter Kimbrough is the president of Dillard University, a historically black college located in Louisiana, decided to participate in the coronavirus vaccine, after months of chaos and destruction that arose from the spread of the virus.
The president indicated that he realized that it was time for him to take bolder steps and join the coronavirus trials in phase three.
While speaking on his decision to join the coronavirus vaccine trials, Kimbrough said that he felt helpless for months and realized that he could not magically wish the virus away. Therefore, he took the only decision he knew would help contribute to defeating the virus, which was getting in the vaccine trials.
The decision to join the coronavirus vaccine trial
He indicated that when he told people about his decision to join the coronavirus vaccine trials, he was met with resistance from his community members, who urged him to drop out of the program. Kimbrough indicated that never would he think that people would be against such a decision, saying that he was surprised that people’s first response to his choice was outrage on why he would do something like that.
However, the president indicated that he knew where the people who were objecting to his decision to join the program were coming from. He said that he was reminded, as an African American man, of the history and abuses they had had to go through, including slavery, the Tuskegee experiment, and even recent studies that showed that African American mortality rates for newborns were higher when a physician was white.
However, his urge came from the fact that he had seen what the disease had done to the African American communities in just a few short months, where one in 1,000 African Americans had died of the virus. Being a historically Black college president, where 95 percent of his students are Black, he said that they had been hit harder by the virus, with many infected or affected on personal levels.
Therefore, not only did he opt-in for the coronavirus trials, but he also called on members of his community to take bold steps and also enroll in the coronavirus vaccine trial programs. He said that at this point, he didn’t care about who got mad due to his decision of joining the vaccine trial program, he just wanted to contribute to finding a permanent solution that could help curb the virus that has caused over 200.000 deaths in the US and causes record unemployment in the country.
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