One place I couldn’t avoid was the American Deep South. In Tuskegee, Alabama, I met the former mayor of the city, Omar Neal whose family hid a dark secret for decades: Syphilis.His Uncle and Great Uncle took part in what was known at the time as ‘The United States Public Health Service TuskegeeAs the name suggests, it was a study conducted by the American Government between 1932 and 1972 to find out what would happen to Black men if they had syphilis and it was left untreated.
For decades the Tuskegee Syphillis Study was being referenced by academics in medical journals, but it was hidden from the men involved and from the wider, non-medical public.supports HTML5 video By the time Omar became mayor the truth was known and then-President Clinton had apologised publicly – but Omar told me it’s only now that Tuskegee has recovered its self image and learned to call this experiment what he thinks it was: white supremacy in action.
Down the road from Tuskegee in Montgomery, Alabama, I discovered something else. The ‘father of modern gynaecology’ experimented on Black slave women before opening a surgery for White women and revolutionising his profession. While Dr Sims is celebrated – his statue stands outside the Alabama state capitol – Black women are still four times more likely to die in childbirth than White women and that hardly gets mentioned.
When I asked Michelle if she would take the Covid vaccine her answer was an emphatic, ‘Absolutely not!’ I wasn’t surprised to hear her say it. As she puts it, ‘Black women already have a mistrust of almost everything, related to what we go through in the health service, so vaccine hesitancy is only natural.’
On my travels, I also met Saeed Shah, the Pakistani journalist who broke the story of how the CIA had caught Osama Bin Laden. Saeed told me how they used a fake vaccine campaign to gain entry to Bin Laden’s house and get DNA from his children. Polio is on the rise and Covid vaccines are being shunned – even as the country struggles to get hold of enough doses. And its not just in Pakistan, all over the Muslim world the story confirmed a long held suspicion that health workers who get foreign funding are actually spies – which has lead to deep suspicion of all vaccines.
In the 1990s Uganda was battling a wave of HIV/Aids cases. Lydia’s uncle Josiah had HIV and in 1994 he was approached by American doctors who were trialling a new drug combination therapy that could help him.
Why did I see this and immediately think of CookeNichola 😄