My latest #LIHerald.com editorial….
During February, Black History Month, we celebrate the great African-American political and civil rights leaders, scientists, artists, poets, movie stars and athletes. But we must also pause to recall America’s dark past, stained by horrific acts against Black and brown people, at times perpetrated by our own government.
As the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, it’s critical that we look back at the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” to understand the distrust that many African-Americans feel toward our government and medical institutions. That distrust may be a contributing factor in the significantly higher Covid-19 infection rate and death toll seen among Black and brown people.
The Tuskegee study was supposed to last six months. It carried on for 40 years, from 1932 to 1972, a collaboration between the U.S. Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute, a historically Black college in Alabama. The study of 600 poor Black sharecroppers examined 399 with syphilis and 201 without the disease. Study participants were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” a colloquialism for syphilis, anemia and fatigue, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In truth, they weren’t being treated at all — even after 1945, when penicillin was accepted as “the treatment of choice for syphilis.”
In fact, the study looked at what would happen if syphilis were to go untreated — but the participants never knew that. It wasn’t until 1972, when an Associated Press story disclosed the study, that it ended.
Is it any wonder that many African-Americans might distrust the continual exhortations of our federal, state and local governments to be inoculated against the coronavirus as soon as they can?
To read the editorial in its entirety, click here.
