[The Hill] The rollout of the first approved COVID-19 vaccine this week is raising questions of when the game-changing inoculations will be ready for everyday Americans.
But for communities of color, especially Black communities, that carry a deep-seated mistrust of the government, the question is if they will take the vaccine at all.
The mistrust isn’t surprising.
From the early to mid-20th century, tens of thousands of nonwhite women were sterilized by the government.
For four decades, the government ran what is known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study in the deep South on exclusively Black men. Researchers never received informed consent from the participants, nor offered them treatment for the disease even after penicillin became the main form of treatment for syphilis. The experiment wasn’t stopped until 1972.
In 1951, doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore removed tissue samples without consent from Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who was being treated for cervical cancer. Part of the tissue sample became the first immortalized human cell line and is still widely used in cancer research today.
All of these things happened within the past 100 years and have not been easily forgotten. |