SAVANNAH, Ga. – Black Americans are more hesitant than white Americans to take the COVID-19 vaccine.
The reasons for that hit close to home in Savannah, Georgia, where a classified military operation in the 1950s dropped hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes – mosquitoes that many believe were infected with disease – on Carver Village. 
"They didn't tell anybody, and it happened," said Chatham County Commission Chairman Chester Ellis. "And so that leaves some apprehension, especially when you have residents of that area who've been there since the '50s. And so my job as neighborhood president, and also as chairman of the County Commission, is to kind of calm the storm down to let them know that this vaccination is not like that."
The Kaiser Family Foundation, which has been tracking attitudes about the vaccine for months, indicates 43% of Black adults in the U.S. are taking a "wait and see" approach to the vaccine, according to results of a poll completed Jan. 18. That compares to 26% of white adults in the same poll who say that when an FDA approved vaccine for COVID-19 is available to them for free, they would wait and see how it is working for other people.
Caution is a rational approach to centuries of structural racism, said Savannah resident and activist Natavia Sanders. 
"This has been the only system of America that American descendants of slaves know, and therefore there are automatic cautions to survival," Sanders said. It only makes sense for Blacks to question vaccines and studies, she said, after "countless times of being the study (subject) for things without their consent or knowledge."
The infamous Tuskegee Study in which hundreds of Black men in Alabama went untreated for syphilis without their informed consent is just one injustice. In Savannah, a secret military program in the Cold War called Operation Big Buzz tested the viability of deploying mosquitoes as a delivery system of disease warfare by dropping thousands of mosquitoes on the Black neighborhood of Carver Village.