People as test subjects: the Tuskegee scandal and its consequences

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Lucenia Dunn is not a corona denier.

At the beginning of the pandemic, she urged people around her to wear masks and keep their distance.

But the former mayor of the small town of Tuskegee in the US state of Alabama does not want to be vaccinated for the time being.

Like so many others in town, she distrusts the authorities.

Because they have the Tuskegee syphilis study in the back of their minds, which abused male African Americans as test subjects.

In 1932 the United States Public Health Service (PHS) had started a long-term study in the Tuskegee area that continued into the early 1970s.

The agency, which is subordinate to the US Department of Health, tried to find out why the drugs that were administered to US soldiers against the sexually transmitted diseases syphilis and gonorrhea in World War I had hardly worked.

African Americans on a syphilis test in North Carolina in their 30s

Source: picture alliance / Everett Colle

The team examined around 400 black farm workers and tenants who had developed syphilis.

The subjects, most of whom could neither read nor write, were left in the dark about the design of the study.

Because that was simply inhuman. 

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Participants were not informed about their disease, nor were they treated with penicillin when it was available since the 1940s.

The aim was to be able to study the venereal disease in people, which often ends in infirmity and death after years.

The infected received hot food, free transportation and a grant for their funeral.

John Charles Cutler, one of the chief doctors, explained the procedure and failed to provide assistance: “It was important that you did not receive (medically) treatment.

It was not desired that they have been treated with large amounts of penicillin because it would have affected the studies. ”He later became a professor of international health at the University of Pittsburgh.

Cutler was also one of the PHS employees who started inhuman experiments in Guatemala in 1946 - the same year, by the way, that the trial of 20 concentration camp doctors was opened in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.

Unlike in Tuskegee, the US doctors in Guatemala did not look for syphilis patients, but created their “study objects” by first infecting prostitutes with the bacterium.

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A total of "427 Guatemalan men, women, prison inmates and mentally ill people were deliberately infected with syphilis," as the American historian Susan Reverby found out.

In 2011 she researched the PHS files on behalf of a commission appointed by President Barack Obama.

The "test subjects" had previously been given penicillin to see whether this would work against an infection.

According to later investigations, 83 people died.

The case only became known when a scientist came across files of the scandalous human experiments in an archive in 2003.

In 2010, US President Obama apologized to Guatemala and its victims for the "despicable research practices".

Herman Shaw (94) also spoke during the 1997 ceremony in which Bill Clinton apologized to the Tuskugee victims

Source: AFP via Getty Images

Earlier, Bill Clinton, as President, had apologized to the Tuskegee victims on behalf of the American government in 1997.

Attorney Fred Gray won the $ 9 million in indemnity.

But the mistrust remained.

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A survey in the fall of 2020 found that 40 percent of African American US citizens refuse to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

"We don't want to be guinea pigs" or "I don't trust the government" are exemplary reasons, as well as: "They want to kill us all, they have already done that with Covid-19." 

At the County Health Department's Immunization Center in Tuskegee in January 2021

Source: AP

Skepticism is therefore more widespread among blacks than among whites, although black Americans are significantly more likely to be infected with the virus.

The Nation of Islam, a black political organization, even warns its members against vaccination.

“Beyond Tuskegee: Why black people are not allowed to take the experimental Covid-19 vaccine,” is the title of an online presentation.

The attorney Gray, who is now 90 years old still working as a lawyer in Tuskegee, does not want to hear about such comparisons.

The syphilis study and the corona vaccine are completely different, he explains.

That is why he has already had himself vaccinated and asks others to do the same.

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