Under the baobab: Black Americans can’t forget history, but must trust COVID-19 vaccine

I read that 90-year-old Margaret Keenan and 90-year-old William Shakespeare had been inoculated with the COVID-19 vaccine in England. It was the second most joyous news I read in December. I called one of the dozen or so people we have maintained contact with for over 50 years. I will call her Sara.

“Sara, looks like we might make it through this plague. They are beginning to distribute the vaccine. We old folks are high on the list after medical workers and nursing home residents.”

“I’m not taking the vaccine,” she said. “There’s no need. This whole pandemic thing is a hoax.”

I was stunned. Sara, though appropriately eccentric, is usually not vulnerable to conservative conspiracies. Together we organized for the McGovern campaign back in the day.

“Sara, it is not a hoax. There are millions of people infected in the U.S. Almost 300,000 are dead.”

“It’s a lie.”

“They wouldn’t lie to us about something so important.”

“The Tuskegee Experiment,” she said solemnly.

In 1932, during the early days of the depression, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted an experiment “to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis.” Using Tuskegee University as a base of operations, they drafted 600 indigent African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama. Most selected were illiterate; 399 had latent syphilis. There was a control group of 201 men who were not infected. White supremacy was very much in the thinking of the researchers. Some scientists and doctors believed that syphilis affected Black people less seriously than it did whites. Taliaferro Clark, head of the project, said:

“The rather low intelligence of the African American population, depressed economic conditions, and the common promiscuous sex relations not only contribute to the spread of syphilis but the prevailing indifference with regards to treatment.”

As an incentive for participation in the study, the men were promised free medical care. The patients were never informed of the purpose of the study or even told they had the disease. Instead they were told they had some vague malady called “bad blood.” PHS used placebos, ineffective methods and diagnostic procedures as fake treatment. In 1947 penicillin became available as a cure for syphilis. None of the infected men were ever given the drug. Instead they were allowed to “continue to term,” to die, suffering from a curable disease.

The experiment lasted 40 years. In 1972 a leak to the press created a scandal. The program was shut down. On behalf of the patients the NAACP brought a successful lawsuit which rendered $10 million dollars to the survivors. In 1997 President Bill Clinton formally apologized. He said:

“What was done cannot be undone. But we can end the silence. We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye and finally say on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry. ... To our African American citizens, I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist.”

The Tuskegee Experiment was not the only government lie that has undermined the trust of African Americans. There were the myths generated during the early stages of HIV-AIDS pandemic which perpetuated the notion that the disease could only be contracted by gays, Haitians and other Black folk.

That was then. This is now. We are all in this boat together. We can’t forget but we must learn to forgive. We have responsible and caring leaders who will stand in line to be inoculated. I will stand behind them. Join us.