China Virus, Tuskegee Vaccine

I was born in 1972. That year marked the end of the Tuskegee Experiment, The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male. Black people know of the Tuskegee Experiment. It’s an American ghost that haunts us. It is one of the innumerable reasons that Black people distrust American institutions and are afraid of the dark corners of the American republic. In light of that distrust, the decision looming ahead is grim – to take, or not to take a vaccine offered by the government of the United States for the COVID-19 virus?

The Tuskegee Study was a medical experiment conducted by the United States Public Health Service to determine what happens to Black men infected with syphilis if left untreated. It is significant that it was sanctioned by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS). USPHS is a division of the Department of Health and Human Services which is part of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government.  It oversees some of the more well-known American health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. It includes commissioned health officers such as the United States Surgeon General.

In 1932, federally sanctioned doctors of the United States ran an experiment on 600 Black men in Alabama. The experiment ran for 40 years with an ever-expanding sample of Black men. It was finally terminated in 1972 because the details were leaked to the press and to an American public reeling from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968 and the smoke of the Civil Rights Movement. 400 of the original Black men infected with syphilis were under the impression they were being treated, but the experiment was to see what happened when the disease ran its course. They were injected with mineral water. Nearly 150 of the 400 men died. Many of their wives, who were summarily infected, also died.

The details of the ordeal are painful, but beside the point. For example, penicillin was determined to be an effective treatment for syphilis in 1947 and was withheld from these men. The Nuremberg trials ended in the late 1940’s after the defeat of the Nazis. Those trials revealed the ghastly medical experiments conducted by the Germans on European Jews which led to national regulatory health policy and human research protocols requiring informed consent. The United States also endured nearly a quarter century of social revolt to enshrine in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that Black people are, in fact, people. All of those things happened during the course of this experiment.

Still, in the end, a federal agency of the United States government oversaw the decades long torture, suffering and death of hundreds of Black men. U.S. doctors took copious medical notes observing these men as they succumbed to neurological disorders, blindness, and untold physical agony, and in many instances death. It matters that this is not an example drawn from the 18th or 19th centuries, in America’s darkest ages of virulent White supremacy. This happened in my lifetime. The financial damages awarded to the families involved began in 1974. The last widow of one of the Tuskegee victims died in 2009.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us facing a decision about a vaccine in an environment where no American institutions, even the exalted halls of the scientific enterprise, are immune from the aggregated inhumanity of individual White racists.  

It feels trite to point out the obvious. The Minneapolis police officer who choked a pleading George Floyd to death, and the Rochester police officer who hooded and asphyxiated a mentally ill Daniel Prude, and the legions of municipalities leaving Black students languishing in ignorance, and the generations of White communities that engaged in spectacle lynching and burning of Black people, and the doctors who knowingly left hundreds of Black men to suffer with syphilis, are all connected.

The common denominator – the American principle that Black people are simply niggers whose lives are akin to lab rats, unbroken horses, or homosapien game in hunting season. We live in a country where the question of whether Black lives matter is an open public debate.

Now enter the issue of a pending COVID-19 vaccine. As of today, 10 September 2020, there are approximately 6.6 million corona virus cases in the United States. Nearly 200,000 people have died from the disease. Nearly 40,000 of those are Black people, and surely that is woefully underreported. The disproportionate morbidity rates among Black people are to be expected in these United States, where our lives may, or may not matter. The pre-existing condition of living in a country that incessantly assaults our humanity makes Black people frightfully vulnerable to this virus.

Source: covidtracker.com/race

The president has referred to COVID-19 as the China Virus, the Kung Flu, the Plague and a number of other racialized and nonsensical monikers. It is nothing new to point out that he has introduced race in incendiary ways.  So when the government of the United States, and the Trump regime in particular, endorses a vaccine to prevent infection from the COVID-19 virus - history tells me, my good sense tells me, my instincts tell me, that it is not in my best interest to take it.

I have no faith that my current government would not prioritize profit and weaponize inconclusive science to the detriment of Black people. The virus has been racialized, why wouldn’t the vaccine?

One logical path suggests that the wealthy and White will quietly influence the distribution and horde the vaccine for themselves and their communities first. Evidence of this logic comes from Senators Richard Burr (R-NC), Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) and Diane Feinstein (D-CA) who allegedly used their private senate intelligence about the corona virus to enrich themselves through stock sales related to the pending pandemic.

This logic also leads to that same group of people profiteering off of the production and distribution of the vaccine, even if they distrust it and do not want to inject it into themselves and their loved ones. Not an illogical leap. Which leads to a second logical pathway.

Another path suggests that the government will publicly declare priority to those communities most impacted and vulnerable, Black people. Under some specious banner of American virtue, a structure of vaccine requirements may prioritize Black people in our roles as essential workers, or our disproportionate residence in U.S. prisons, or our dependence on public schools, or our reliance on certain public services, or simply our living in communities overrun by the virus. Loosely, we could be caught in a web of vaccine requirements threaded with the layers of our dependence on this abusive republic.

Not surprisingly, 4 of the top 5 counties in the United States with the highest per capita death rates from COVID-19 are majority Black counties. That does not include the extraordinary vortex of death among Black people in major urban centers like Chicago, Detroit, Brooklyn, the Bronx and New Orleans. Further evidence that, sadly, the question of whether Black lives in America matter is still an open debate.

Source: covidtracker.com/race

To be clear, I believe in science. I studied engineering. I absolutely believe in the conclusions of repeatable, transparent empirical processes. I also believe in vaccines – Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR), Diphtheria, Tetanus and Whopping Cough (DTap), among others. I have taken them. I believe in vaccination not only as a protection to me, but as partial fulfillment of my responsibility as a citizen and contributing to the maintenance of our collective public health.

But right now, under this regime, while the debate about the value of Black lives lumbers on in this tortured republic, I’m not taking a Tuskegee vaccine for a China virus.

kamau (@kamaubobb)