When coronavirus vaccines first became available to the public, Ira Habiba, 16, knew some immigrant communities might have difficulty accessing quality information about the safety and efficacy of the shots.

She herself moved to the United States from Bangladesh with her family when she was 5, and still remembers the feeling of struggling to communicate with her classmates in the years following. Many non-English speakers, the Quincy, Massachusetts high school junior feared, might miss out on potentially life-saving facts about the virus and immunizations.

“There’s that whole language barrier that makes it a lot more difficult to communicate and share accurate information,” she told The 74. “It also does cause a lot of [vaccine] hesitancy.”

Wanting to do her part to combat the problem, the teen in March signed on as a youth leader with the We Got Us Project, a Boston-based team of high school, undergraduate, and medical students of color working to provide information about coronavirus immunizations to the area’s Black and immigrant communities.

Now, she leads online seminars — called “empowerment sessions” — that address some of the most commonly held misconceptions about the COVID shots. The sessions not only provide facts about the vaccine, but also speak to histories of medical racism, such as the infamous Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis where nearly 400 Black men were denied necessary medication for decades under the guise of free health care.

Read the full article about vaccine advocacy group by Asher Lehrer-Small at The 74.