US civil rights activist Jesse Jackson treated for Covid-19 amid Delta surge in the country
- Jackson, who has Parkinson’s disease, was vaccinated against Covid-19 in January this year
- The news of his hospitalisation comes as the US is being battered by a new wave of Covid-19 cases driven by the Delta variant
Veteran American civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson was on Saturday hospitalised after testing positive for Covid-19, despite having been vaccinated, representatives said.
Jackson, 79, and his wife, Jacqueline Jackson, 77, were being treated at Northwestern Hospital in Chicago, the reverend’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition organisation said in a statement on Facebook.
“Doctors are currently monitoring the condition of both,” it said, adding that anyone who had been around either of them for the last five or six days should follow the guidelines of the government’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Baptist minister Jackson has been a leader in the American Civil Rights movement since the 1960s, when he marched with Martin Luther King and helped raise funds for the cause.
He was the most prominent Black-American to run for the US presidency, with two unsuccessful attempts to capture the Democratic Party nomination in the 1980s, until Barack Obama took the office in 2009.
Jackson announced in 2017 that he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease.