'Instead of rejecting vaccines and new therapeutics that are...used to successfully treat and cure a majority of the population, Tuskegee should have taught Black people to make a simple demand: give me whatever you’re giving the white folk.' | Opinion
Editor’s Note : This article is being showcased in a special collection about equity in health care that was made possible by the support of Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The article was published independently and without sponsorship.
Beginning in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service dangled the promise of free medical care to recruit rural Black men in Alabama’s Macon County to participate in the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” Even after penicillin became widely available as an effective treatment 15 years later, the researchers withheld the drug and watched as the men died or were ravaged by the effects of untreated syphilis.
If that had happened 70 years ago, Tuskegee, Ala., might be better known for the historically Black university that bears its name than for a government injustice chronicled in books, movies, plays and congressional hearings. That’s why months later I decided to participate in the vaccine trials. I wanted to ensure that Black people were adequately represented in the research and to show that the vaccine should be embraced, not shunned. My motives weren’t completely altruistic: clinical trial volunteers were supposed to be at or near the front of the line when a vaccine became available. That couldn’t happen soon enough for me.
It’s almost taken as a given that our distrust is responsible for the low participation rates. But a study published in the journal Cancer found that some study recruiters viewed racial and ethnic minorities as less promising participants and in some cases reported withholding trial opportunities from them based on these perceptions.
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