Washington – Veteran American civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson was hospitalized after testing positive for COVID-19 despite being vaccinated, officials said on Saturday.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, 79, and his wife, Jacqueline Jackson, 77, were being treated at Northwestern Hospital in Chicago, the Reverend’s Rainbow PUSH coalition organization said in a statement on Facebook.
“Doctors are currently monitoring the condition of both of them. Anyone who has been around one of them in the past five or six days should adhere to guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the brief statement said.
Baptist minister Jackson has been a leader in the American civil rights movement since the 1960s when he marched with Martin Luther King and raised funds for the cause.
He was the most prominent African American to run for the U.S. presidency with two unsuccessful attempts to win the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 1980s until Barack Obama took office in 2009.
Jackson was vaccinated against the coronavirus in January of this year, when he made a statement urging black Americans, who are more hesitant to vaccinate, to get the vaccination.
“For understandable reasons … African Americans suspect scientists and vaccines,” the statement read, adding that if they “refuse a vaccination, everything is at risk.”
COVID-19 vaccines are free and widely available in the United States, even though only half of the total population is fully vaccinated.
The announcement of Jackson’s hospitalization comes as the United States is hit by a new wave of COVID-19 cases fueled by the highly contagious Delta variant, which has increased the number of national daily cases to over 70,000 and raises concerns let the vaccine become less effective.
Jackson announced in 2017 that he had Parkinson’s disease.
The Reverend, who served as US President Bill Clinton’s envoy for Africa, was awarded the highest French Order of Merit, the Legion of Honor, by French President Emmanuel Macron in July.
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