The three most recent former U.S. presidents — Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George Bush — said they are willing to be vaccinated in public against covid-19 to help promote the safety of the process and encourage skeptical Americans to do the same.

If Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, thinks the vaccine is safe and effective, then he will get his shot, former President Obama said.

“I promise you that when it’s been made for people who are less at risk, I will be taking it. I may end up taking it on TV or having it filmed, just so that people know that I trust this science,” Obama said in an interview on SiriusXM’s The Joe Madison Show. Audio from the show was posted to YouTube on Wednesday. The show is scheduled to air Thursday, NPR reported.

After Obama said he may go live on TV getting his vaccine, representatives for former presidents Bush and Clinton said they were also on board to go public with their shots, NPR reported.

Bush reached out to Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, to see if he could help promote vaccination, CNN reported.

“First, the vaccines need to be deemed safe and administered to the priority populations,” Freddy Ford told CNN. “Then, President Bush will get in line for his, and will gladly do so on camera.”

Clinton is also willing to take a vaccine in public on TV if that will help encourage others to do the same, his press secretary, Angel Urena, told CNN.

Massachusetts-based biotech firm Moderna has announced that its experimental covid-19 vaccine is 94-percent-plus effective. A vaccine developed by Pfizer — the New York-based drugmaker best known for Xanax and Viagra — protected more than 90 percent of symptomatic infections in the Phase two trial of tens of thousands of volunteers.

Black community leaders in Chicago want Black residents, who were disproportionately affected by the virus, to be the first to receive protection against covid-19. In April, 70 percent of covid-19 deaths in Chicago were Black people. 

Despite the urging of community leaders, there remains a major distrust of the medical field and medical experiments by the Black community in Chicago and beyond. It dates back to the Tuskegee syphilis research, which withheld treatment of poor Black men over a 40-year period, and beyond.

“When you think about how the government has failed … the Black and Brown communities, that’s the trust that Black people struggle with,” said Illinois State Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Chicago Democrat, in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times.

If Obama gets his coronavirus vaccine live on TV, it won’t be the first time he participates in a public effort to overcome objections during a medical emergency.

Obama sipped water in Flint, Michigan during a 2016 speech to show that it was safe to drink the city’s polluted water as long as it was filtered.

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Obama has been criticized for his reaction to the Flint water crisis. Many felt he failed to address the main reason the government was slow to react — race. The population of Flint is 57 percent Black, according to the U.S. Census.

The Flint water crisis highlighted systemic racism in Michigan, according to a government-appointed civil rights commission report released in February 2019.

A viral video from right-wing comedian Terrence K. Williams claimed in 2016 that Obama “made fun of the Flint water crisis and mocked the people who suffered and died from it” by asking for a glass of water at a rally in Flint.

The Dispatch fact-checked the charges and concluded that Obama did not “make fun of the Flint water crisis and moc[k] the people who suffered and died from it.” Rather, in requesting and drinking the water, he demonstrated to Flint residents that filtering their water made it safe for drinking.