During the spread of the new coronavirus there is a mistrust among some black Americans about future treatments and getting vaccinated. Historically, the government and the healthcare industry have not always treated black Americans like humans but more as test subjects.
In 1932 the United States Public Health service began the study of syphilis, a chronic bacterial disease that is contracted mostly during sexual intercourse, however for this experiment the men being studied were injected with the disease at the Tuskegee institute in hopes of justifying treatment programs for blacks. It was dubbed the “Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in the Negro Male” according to the Center for Disease Control.
The study involved 600 black men, 399 of whom had syphilis and 201 who did not have the disease. The study was conducted without the men being properly informed; in fact, they were told they were being treated for “bad blood”. In truth the men did not receive proper treatment for the disease and a medical study that was supposed to last only 6 months lasted for 40 years.
In July 1972 the assistant secretary for health and scientific affairs appointed an advisory panel to review the study. The panel found that the men were not given the full information of the study and in fact were misinformed of its real intensions. Without all the facts the men could not have provided informed consent.
During the study the men were never given adequate treatment and when penicillin became widely available and was mostly used to treat the disease in 1947, they were not given the drug. The advisory panel also found that the researchers never gave a choice to the men to quit the study. In October 1972 the panel found that the study was “ethically unjustified” and ended the experiments.
By the end of the experiment 28 black men had died from syphilis, 100 dead from complications, 40 of the men’s wives had been infected and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis. Throughout history in the United States black Americans have been used as test subjects for hospitals and the physicians that reside in them.
J. Marion Sims, known as the “Father of modern gynecology” often used enslaved women to experiment on. Sims pioneered a surgical technique to repair vesicovaginal fistula which is a tear between the uterus and bladder that caused constant pain and urine leakage that was a common complication of childbirth in the 19th century.
In 1950 at John Hopkins Hospital, Henrietta Lacks, a black mother of five was given a biopsy that indicated she had a tumor growth on her cervix. While being treated, tissue samples were collected from Lacks without her knowledge or consent and sent to the head physician of tissue culture research George Grey.
Henrietta Lacks died in 1951 from cervical cancer and although Lacks’ cells contributed to the development of the drugs for many diseases like polio and Parkinson disease it was the unethical nature of how those cells were obtained which sticks in the minds of many black Americans.
There are many in black America who are skeptical of the medical community and their sincerity about truly helping treat black Americans during the covid-19 pandemic. For those suspicions to begin to subside and for trust to be gained, those in the medical community would have to acknowledge the unethical practices that have taken place over the hundreds of years of blacks and illegal the use of black bodies as experimentations to further medical research.
The Honezt Texan 