By Derek Lowe 26 June, 2020
I mentioned yesterday in my post about anti-vaccine arguments that there seemed to be suspicions on social media platforms about vaccine testing in Africa. I’ve been looking around for more of that, and finding plenty of it. I’ve also heard from a colleague with some pertinent thoughts about how these things get going, and I think it’s worth addressing all this in a separate post.
Some History
First off, it is all to easy to realize where the suspicions about using Africa (and Africans) as a test bed come from. You can start with the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, an inhuman project that has stained biomedical research ever since. Yes, for forty years health authorities deliberately left black men in Alabama untreated to watch what happened as they slowly developed tertiary syphilis, all the time being told that they were receiving free care from the government. The male subjects were observed as they slowly died of the disease, while their wives contracted it from them and (in some cases) their children were born with it. Over the years, several people who became aware of the study expressed ethical concerns, only to be brushed aside. If you’re imagining a few amoral ringleaders operating in secret, though, prepare to be even more disillusioned: the study (including its design of leaving the men untreated and not informing them that they had syphilis) was endorsed by Robert Moton, head of the Tuskegee Institute (who died in 1940). Local physicians participated in the evaluation of the subjects. And the local chapters of the American Medical Association and the National Medical Association (the latter historically representing African-American physicians) actually both expressed support for the study’s continuation in the mid-1960s in a CDC report. (Both groups have since had internal examinations, often acrimonious, of their roles in the affair). No, like many other indefensible acts, this one had plenty of people who were willing to go along with it. As the world knows, the whistle was finally blown for good in 1972 and the study was halted amid a huge and totally justified outcry…read more.