Rhyana A Shah

Model, Event Organiser, NHS Worker

Things I've Learnt

About black fears of vaccination

07 January 2021

Why are Black People so skeptical about medical treatments including vaccinations?

Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment - It was called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.”

From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service offered 600 African-American men food, free medical care and burial insurance for participating in the study. About 400 of these poor Alabamans had Syphilis. The government studied the natural progression of the disease until death with no treatment ever offered, even though penicillin was an easy, cheap and safe cure accepted in 1947. They were never told why they were being studied, and had given no consent. The study was supposed to last 6 months.

John Quier freely experimented with smallpox inoculation in a population of 850 enslaved people during the 1768 epidemic. Quier was employed by owners of enslaved people and would have inoculated plantation workers for smallpox, with or without his scientific experiments and no consent of enslaved people. He wanted to know, for example, whether one could safely inoculate menstruating or pregnant women. He also wanted to know if it was safe to inoculate newborn infants or a person already suffering from dropsy, yaws or fever etc. So he wrote letters admitting he sometimes inoculated repeatedly in the same person and at his own expense, for an interest of science, not over wellbeing of the person he was experimenting on.

Henrietta Lacks was a mother to 5 who died in 1951 at the age of 31 from cervical cancer. Doctors took sample cells from her biopsy, and gave them to a researcher without her knowledge or consent after noticing they multiplied instead of dying out. These cells kept multiplying, so they just kept dishing them out to whoever. She died but her cells are still used today, even developing the C-19 vaccination. Some time in the 1990’s a young woman called Erika Johnson was in High School Biology holding HeLa cells, then realised they’re from her own Great-Grandmother. For decades after Henrietta’s death, doctors and scientists repeatedly failed to ask her family for consent as they revealed Lacks’s name publicly, gave her medical records to the media, and even published her cells’ genome online. (Following an outcry, the genome was soon removed.)

I’ve spoken about the work of J Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynaecology” who developed the tool we commonly know today as a speculum. He also pioneered a surgical technique to repair vesicovaginal fistula, a common 19th-century complication of childbirth in which a tear between the uterus and bladder caused constant pain and urine leakage. Sims conducted his experiments on enslaved women with no anaesthesia or consent. He was operating under the long believed concept that Black people could not feel pain. Before this he was effectively a repair shop for Negros so they could recover and continue working for their possessors. If the patients’ owners provided clothing and paid taxes, Sims effectively took temporary ownership of the women until their treatment was completed. “There was never a time that I could not, at any day, have had a subject for operation.”

According to Sims, this was the most “memorable time” of his life. ~ quotes from his own autobiography. One of his patients Lucy was in “surgery” for over an hour screaming and writhing in pain, and after he perfected it on black women, began on white women who were provided with anaesthetic. The belief that black people can’t feel pain is still prevalent in modern day, according to “Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites” By Kelly M. Hoffman, Sophie Trawalter, Jordan R. Axt, and M. Norman Oliver PNAS April 19, 2016

However, Sims didn’t start off with Gynaecological interest. Before and after his gynecological experiments, he also tested surgical treatments on enslaved Black children in an effort to treat “trismus nascentium” (neonatal tetanus)—with little to no success. Sims also believed that African Americans were less intelligent than white people, and thought it was because their skulls grew too quickly around their brain. He would operate on African American children using a shoemaker’s tool to pry their bones apart and loosen their skulls.

Coming back to present day, A French doctor apologized once social media caught wind, after suggesting that Africa should become a testing ground for a COVID-19 vaccine. Jean-Paul Mira, head of the intensive care unit at the Cochin Hospital in Paris, made the comments in an interview that aired in March 2020 on the French television channel LCI with Camille Locht, the research director at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, Inserm. “If I could be provocative, shouldn’t we do this study in Africa where there are no masks, treatment, or intensive care, a little bit like we did in certain AIDS studies or with prostitutes?” Mira asked. “We tried things on prostitutes because they are highly exposed and do not protect themselves.”

Remember, in 2020 when concerns about censorship mounted after third-party submissions, which reportedly highlighted structural racism and social inequality, were left out of the government-commissioned report on the disproportionate effects of Covid-19 on BAME people. People of Bangladeshi heritage in England are twice as likely to die if they contract the virus than white people, while other BAME groups face an increased risk of up to 50%, the Public Health England (PHE) report found, after claims it was due to be delayed because of fears it could stoke racial tensions. They’d rather not rock the boat, instead of releasing a report which shows racial disparity amongst medical treatment and socioeconomic support.

So that’s why Black people (as well as other POC) have medical skepticism.

Sources (It’s not an essay, I’m not Harvard Referencing):

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