The proportion of vaccinated African Americans is lower in every state that publicly shared race and ethnicity data for vaccinated individuals 1. But why is this not shocking? The exploitation of African Americans by health care professionals throughout history has produced a relationship infected with distrust, fear, resentment, and hostility. During slavery, doctors claimed that slaves who wanted freedom, a fundamental human right, must have a disease influencing them mentally. Doctors concluded that the minds of slaves were not capable of functioning past the demands of slavery 2. This fatal injustice attitude against African Americans continued throughout history and is still potent in the health care system today. During the Flu Pandemic of 1918, healthcare officials used physical features to support scientifically absurd medical claims. They stated that African Americans could not be susceptible to the flu because the linings of their ‘big noses’ were resistant to the microorganism that affects the respiratory system. Doctors endangered African Americans by stereotyping them as having ‘big noses’ and then leveraged that to support false medical claims. Consequently, all resources were given to white communities because this incorrect statement circulated as truth, formulating a belief that the virus only contaminated white people 2. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male was an approximately forty-year human experiment, which started in 1932. The United States Public Health Service (USPHS) treated African American males as lab study subjects rather than humans with valuable lives. Public Health professionals lied to African American males infected with syphilis by promising them treatment. However, their true intentions were far from that promise. Instead, they kept these males isolated and used them to observe the progression of untreated advanced syphilis and then compared them to a control group. During these forty years, the USPHS did not allow their “subjects” to know their own health status. The USPHS carried such little regard for these men’s lives that they did not keep proper records, so there is no accurate number of deaths. It is estimated that over 100 died, but there is no way of knowing the real number of lives lost from this study without records. Later, once the cure, Penicillin, was discovered, the USPHS denied treatment to these infected individuals several times. The USPHS ignored the law in Alabama (passed in 1927) mandating the reporting and treatment of various diseases, which included syphilis. This study demonstrates a core cause for the distrust and fear towards healthcare professionals as African Americans were lied to and treated like lab rats. Over the forty years, other medical personnel, who had the power to act, did not speak out against the study showing the “moral astigmatism” present in health care. A CDC committee promoted the study’s continuation in 1969. It was not until 1972 when the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, stopped the study 3. In 1960 the government created programs to provide health care for disadvantaged groups, but this only lasted a decade. The African American health care crisis in the 1990s began directly after this inexcusable neglect. The government and health care professionals made a promise to African Americans only to break it and leave them in crisis 4. Today, while vaccines for COVID-19 roll out, the skepticism and fear in African Americans to get vaccinated is not shocking due to a history of being lied to, deeply mistreated, and targeted. Moreover, despite being impacted disproportionately harder, they are not being prioritized to receive vaccines. Now we have laws that aim to protect against prejudice-influenced behavior. However, there were laws in Alabama at the time of Tuskegee that healthcare professionals broke. What is to stop that from happening again? Too many racist patterns fill the history of health care for African Americans to know who to trust and who to avoid so they are forced not to trust at all.
Author: Anika Mayar
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