evidence: The medical establishment has a long history of mistreating Black Americans — from gruesome experiments on enslaved people to the forced sterilizations of Black women and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study that withheld treatment from hundreds of Black men for decades to let doctors track the course of the disease. So it’s not surprising that just 42 percent of Black Americans said in November they’d be willing to take a COVID-19 vaccine. As Michael Che, one of the stars of Saturday Night Live, quipped last month, "I’ve got mixed feelings about the vaccine. On the one hand, I’m Black, so naturally I don’t trust it. But on the other hand, I’m on a white TV show, so I might actually get the real one." [...] With COVID-19 vaccines, Kenneth Hempstead, M.D., a pediatrician who serves as vaccine communications lead for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, says both empathy and information are important; because these are new vaccines, clinicians need to be extraordinarily transparent about what we do and don’t know about long-term safety concerns. "I’m optimistic about the vaccines," he says. "But if we say we have 100 percent confidence in them, and there turns out to be a problem, we run the risk of ruining the public’s trust in all vaccines."