The COVID-19 vaccine: I’d give it a shot if they’d let me
At the top of this post is a cartoon making fun of the difficulties many of us are having in our attempts to get the vaccine the government wants us to take.
I planned on writing about delays, trying to get on vaccine waiting lists, websites that don’t work and drug stores that want access to your medical files so they can roam through them and then send you emails about the great product they have to treat the athlete’s foot you suffered 12 years ago.
Which I thought might be funny.
And I thought I’d start things off by mentioning a study that said about 1/3 of Americans are skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccine and might not take it and that skepticism was particularly strong in the Black community. Then I decided to look up the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (I knew the story in general, but was short on details) which might help explain the Black community’s skepticism.
And down the internet rabbit hole I went.
Just in case you haven’t kept up on Racist-Stuff-White-People-Did…
According to the internet, in the 1930s approximately 1-in-10 Americans had syphilis; the other nine were nuns.
(OK, totally made up that last part, but when 10 percent of your population has a disease it’s a big deal and if you need a comparison, around 15% of Americans have had COVID-19. Bottom line: by the 1930s lots of Americans had syphilis which might explain how the Roaring Twenties got the nickname.)
In 1932 doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service wanted to do a study on syphilis and got 600 Black American males in Macon County, Georgia to participate by promising them free medical care. Most of the Black males were sharecroppers, had never been to a doctor before and the doctors told them they were being treated for “bad blood” which is almost as scientific as treating them for the “willies” or “heebie-jeebies.”
As you might have noticed, the doctors were lying.
In 1932 there was no treatment for syphilis and doctors wanted to study the full progression of the disease while they pretended to give them medical care. Of the 600 participants, 399 of them had latent syphilis and 201 were free of the disease and were used as the control group, which – if you didn’t pay attention in high school biology and I know I didn’t – means the doctors were going to compare what happened to the subjects with syphilis to the subjects without.
By 1947 – 15 years into the study – the Public Health Service doctors knew they could treat syphilis with penicillin, but left study participants untreated and convinced local doctors not to treat the study participants either.
One more time: doctors knew they could help those guys and didn’t do it because it would screw up their study and if you can get the government to pay you while you study something for a really, really long time, it’s a pretty sweet deal.
Because the doctors provided no medical care while pretending they were, study participants went blind, insane and/or died, while doctors watched and took notes and said things like, “Hmmm…interesting. That one went blind and then insane and just last week we had one go insane and then blind. Jenkins, write that down.”
The study was still going on in the mid-1960s when a Public Health Service venereal disease investigator (a profession I did not know existed or I might have finished my college education) found out about the study and said maybe this was kinda unethical, not to mention totally fucked up, and in response the Public Health Service formed a committee to review the study and the committee decided to let the study run its course until all the study participants died so they could do autopsies and the data could be analyzed.
IN YOUR FACE, JOSEF MENGELE!!!
Turns out, the Nazis had nuthin’ on us.
(And I have now set a Personal Best for consecutive mentions of Nazis – three columns in a row – and you might want to check my next offering to see if I can tie the Nazi-Mentioning World Record. Keep your fingers crossed.)
So because the committee decided to do jackshit – a not uncommon result of committees – the V.D. investigator (which would make a great title for a TV show and I’m sure have terrific ratings) leaked the story to a reporter and it finally got out in…wait for it…1972.
So this Evil with a capital ‘E’ study had been going on for 40 years when public outrage finally shut the study down. But not before at least 40 spouses of the untreated subjects had been diagnosed with syphilis and 19 children had been born with it.
A very-related story alert
I found all this on the history.com website which also provided a link to another story, and this one was about Dr. James Marion Sims who became known as the “father of modern gynecology.” But you might want to mentally remove “modern” from his title because Sims research was conducted in the late 1800s on enslaved Black women and he performed surgery on them without anesthesia because Dr. Sims believed Black people did not feel pain.
You gotta wonder what Dr. Sims thought all the screaming was about.
In 1876 Sims was named president of the American Medical Association and it turns out there are a half-dozen statues of this guy around the country, although the article didn’t say exactly where they were located, but you might want to keep a can of Krylon spray paint handy just in case you run across one.
But wait…there’s more
You might think Dr. Sims’ belief that Black people did not feel pain was some ignorant attitude from the 1800s, but according to yet another link provided by history.com racial bias in pain management still exists today.
According to a study published in 2016, Black Americans get undertreated for pain management when compared to White Americans because some White people – and that includes White medical students – continue to hold false beliefs about biological differences and one of those false beliefs is Black people feel less pain that White people.
The study also revealed that Black people get under-prescribed for medications and White people get overprescribed for medications, a conclusion I find so upsetting I plan on calling my doctor as soon as I’m done writing and getting him to prescribe a Mason Jar full of Xanax.
And one more horrific story of medical mistreatment
Because they believed Black people were more resistant to pain and injury, during WWII the military covertly tested mustard gas and other chemicals on our Black soldiers.
“Thank you for your service and if you cough up part of a lung, let us know so we can write that down.”
So the moral of the story appears to be this: if you want to do some sketchy medical experiments, pick subjects at the bottom of society’s food chain who can’t complain or if they do complain, won’t get listened to.
White whine
So…
After reading in more detail what Black Americans have gone through, I kinda felt like an overprivileged White whiner who was all set to complain about a temporary delay in getting vaccinated, which seems like small potatoes compared to someone performing South of the Border Surgery without anesthesia or letting people of the wrong color go blind or insane or possibly both because they thought it would be interesting.
So for at least one day I’m not going to whine about my personal problems, which will be a temporary policy because in one form or another whining has paid my bills since 1976.
But next time someone holds up a Black Lives Matter sign, takes a knee during the National Anthem or decides they don’t fully trust the medical community, remember:
History is on their side.
Wow! I'm feeling retroactively ashamed and sick to stomach.