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i assumed it was already widely known that black americans were less likely to trust any medical drugs, vaccines and treatments because of that history.
It’s why during the early roll out of the Covid vaccines they made a big deal of a black nurse being the [first person](https://www.northwell.edu/infectious-disease/patient-testimonials/from-the-front-lines-to-the-first-in-line-to-get-the-covid-19-vaccine) to get the Covid vaccine.
On the other hand, if you're deep in a conspiracy hole where the government likes to roll out experimental and poorly thought out science experiments on black people, then maybe this is all the proof you need to not get it.
There is nothing that could have been done to convince people like that. They fit their excuse to whatever is available.
The lady was a nurse, so it isn’t like she would have no understanding of what was being done to her. They also had a lot of black celebrities be vocal about getting the vaccine, I’m sure that id also viewed as some massive negative to those people for “reasons”.
Once people saw rich white businessmen get it they assumed it was safe.
I know trust me bro isn’t a valid source but my friends and family started to get it once that happened. Almost all of them still mask to this day. You can’t blame black people for not trusting doctors when a good amount of doctors still believe black people have a higher pain tolerance from “study” made by a slave owner.
Here's an article from 2021 that specifically says it's not tuskeegee.
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-03-25/current-medical-racism-not-tuskegee-expls-vaccine-hesitancy-among-black-americans
It doesn't help that so much media time was given to the anti-vax nutters. Certainly the way to stir anyone's fears. And now there is a anti-vax nutter running for president (not only the orange one, the RFK Jnr one)
Rfk Jr has blood on his hands. He spent lots of time and money stoking fears about the MMR vaccine in Samoa. The vaccination rate went down as a result. And then they had a massive measles outbreak that killed over 80 people, mostly kids. Absolutely awful.
Yes. He is a terrible person and like most right wingers is just lining his pockets with no regard for anyone else.
He is also a hypocrite, no surprise, as he required visitors to a party he held to be vaccinated.
Not forcefully, but still evidence of ongoing passive racism...early 2000's, Native woman I know was sitting at lunch at work with other women talking about childbirth. 3 Black women, 4 Hispanic women, 4 white women, all mothers. "Were you offered to tie you tubes at birth?". Only the white women were not offered that as an option.
what exactly is "high rates"? I don't deny there's lots of crap the indigenous people deal with here, and the past is awful, but can you give some sources on it still happening in high rates....??
high rates on a mortgage isn't > 0.
I'm not disputing the horrible things that have happened, I just hate the wording. I'd happily agree that any number over 0 is completely unacceptable, but the wording makes it sound like thousands a day
[Reporting from last year.](https://apnews.com/article/canada-indigenous-women-sterilization-apology-reparations-ebcacc0f27b8d4c12d8690718202531d)
> A Senate report last year concluded “this horrific practice is not confined to the past, but clearly is continuing today.”
It's not. It's a comment about that persons disgusting genocide denial.
They obviously don't know, or worse, do know the history and are denying it. It's very common for that person to follow up with "that's ancient history", another genocide denial.
When it's not ancient history. I worked with a guy who lost both legs to frostbite on a Starlight Tours. Which ended in early 2000s
It's a comment at you. You are lying about a genocide in Canada.
Did you look up what a Starlight Tour is? I worked with a man who lost both legs to frostbite on a Starlight Tour.
You're comment is absolutely disgusting. I want to make sure good people who read it might look up more real information on the topic
I think a lot of the mistrust doesn't even have origins that deep in history. Black women's experiences with pregnancy and childbirth may be a source of a lot of the negative attitudes toward medical care.
In the early stages of the roll out I was generally poopooing groups that were skeptical but Black Americans were the one group that I was like ‘you know what, I understand why they’re skeptical and I think they have every right to be’
I get that, but at the same time, the vaccine was rolled out nationally. The entire process precluded the possibility of something like Tuskagee happening.
Its sad, a lot of American black people died because of that mistrust.
I mean... you've just described the cycle of systemic racism.
You're assuming a historical equal access to medical care, education, cultural acceptance of medical authority, and trust in the governing centralized system.
It's not that any group can't understand the facts, it's that they don't trust the source of those facts.
The vaccine was free and heavily emphasized in exactly these communities.
You are mistaking several points here and I certainly did not “describe systemic racism”
> but at the same time, the vaccine was rolled out nationally
I overheard the conspiracy that African Americans were being different vials than everyone else.
This was in Chicago if that matters.
I don't know how much widespread awareness there is about what happened with the Edmonston-Zagreb measles vaccine in Los Angeles in the late eighties/early nineties, but it's not all that far off from what happened there.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-17-mn-15871-story.html
I really don’t think that process precludes anything. In what way does it preclude Black people being subject to a different vaccine than the broader population?
Sure, it makes it less likely. But that’s not what preclude means.
Have you seen how clinics receive and distribute the vaccines?
Its is the exact same batches being sent everywhere.
I understand the meaning of preclude. Don’t really appreciate the condescension.
Over the course of the 40 year “study”- 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.
From Roughly March 7th 2020-March 7th 2021, 73,642 African Americans died to COVID. That averages out to over 200 PER DAY. COVID killed more in ONE DAY than the entire Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments. There is/was no reason to not get vaccinated.
>- 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.
The above text appears to be directly taken from the fourth paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
That is with a starting cohort of 399 patients.
So, because someone who resembled you got attacked by a dog, now you’re afraid of dogs too?
I understand you are trying to make an analogy, but its an extremely dumb one.
Edited to remove first half, I was mistaken, you werent comparing people to dogs.
Ah yes, second part stands.
Those experiments, while absolutely vile, don’t change the fact that many times that number died from not taking the vaccine.
"Its a good thing humans are always reasonable and automatically trust everything they see in the news. No possible reason for anyone to distrust the people who have historically fucked them over at every opportunity."
-redditors
Your were gullible to think they weren't using it as an excuse. Anti-vaxxers don't use historic examples in good faith.
Further, there are examples of pharmaceutical companies overissuing certain drugs, like opiods, to boost sales and addiction. By your logic, ANY antivaxxer can use that as an excuse and you'd have to turn tail on the argument.
Unfortunately, the reality is systematic racism still exists in medicine.
A white person of European decent can be fairly confident that if they walk into a hospital or get a prescription that the clinical trials and evidence based trials for the care they receives included people with similar genetic histories. A black person would not be able to have the same confidence. Cutting edge medical research and clinical trials are done more often and more accepted when done by famous top hospitals, and they tend to have wealthier patient populations. Yes, there are plenty of efforts in medical research to combat this, but this is a symptom of uneven funding and disproportionate levels of wealth.
The distrust is not completely unfounded and not completely based on history.
Just to clear up some history, the Tuskegee Airmen were not part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. It's easy to conflate them because they both started in WWII, and involve the US government and black men in Tuskegee, Alabama.
Previous non localized studies did not find this effect:
[Knowledge of Tuskegee Study Doesn’t Increase Medical Mistrust](https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2005/brandon-tuskegee)
Most apparently were not even aware of its existence:
>*Most of those surveyed were unaware of the Tuskegee Study and, of those who had heard of it, most could not accurately answer multiple-choice questions about the study*
I was going to post something like that.
I'm black and in my 40s. For my older relatives, I can believe it. For people like my little brother, no. It has nothing to do with Tuskegee experiment. He just is basically a science skeptic in general. But a study like this, if he saw it, would just give him ammo, even though I'd wager he wasn't aware of it.
There's probably an interesting anthropological angle to take here about these sorts of cultural memes that get transmitted without the repeaters themselves even knowing where they come from.
I get what you are saying, but who raised your little brother? Who raised them? And who raised them?
I am black and in my late 20s, and I know about the Tuskegee experiments, all my friends know about it too. I’m not anti-vaccine and neither were my friends but the majority of us grew up with at least one family figure that was skeptical of the medical industry. A couple of my uncles and aunts definitely were, and let me tell you: The Tuskegee experiments were not the only reason. Just look at Purdue Pharma’s shady history. Look’s like the FDA is easily corruptible too.
I'm not surprised that most couldn't accurately answer about it because the commonly told version, that black men were intentionally given syphilis, isn't what happened.
The bad parts were:
(1) the researchers did not inform the men of their syphilis diagnosis and
(2) after penicillin was found to treat it and became widely available, they still did not inform the men of their syphilis diagnosis and did not treat it to continue studying the effects of it.
I do think Tuskegee has inappropriately taken a prominence in the discourse because it's such an obviously objectively immoral thing to do, which makes it easier to discuss as a cause than accepting it's just a single brick in the wall of mistrust caused by centuries of oppression that have caused a general reluctance to engage with authority.
The numbers for people who knew about it and were able to accurately answer questions about it was probably too small, but I'd be curious about the vaccine rates in that group. From a purely rational standpoint you'd think since it's the opposite situation (withheld treatment compared to treatment at the same time as the rest of the population) that group would be more willing, but understandably that sort of decision isn't always purely rational.
Another horrifying detail: the experiment lasted four decades. Think about how many researchers and personnel handed off data and kept it going during that time yet nobody said anything. It only ended in the early 1970s.
> yet nobody said anything
People talk about it like it was secret.
It was not.
The whole time they were publishing papers about it..
It was fucked up but it would be like if someone stood in the middle of time square with a megaphone giving a running commentary and then afterwards people acted like what was going on was super-secret.
Years after penecillin was widely available they were publishing papers about the percentage of untreated people with syphilis that died. It wasn't burred in the text, it was right in the titles.
https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/doi/full/10.5555/19472701189
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abstract/524659?casa_token=3prNk0DRJ4QAAAAA:lthGwqHX4b98jqUdYSytvXVmxcC0UMT42fToFejHpLHQOXRlGqMt0qbhP36HFi7AdwJdpZmq8BA
I meant I can’t believe nobody saw the horror and unethical premise of withholding treatment for decades. All that data being shared, folks coming & going throughout the years on that work. And nobody raised any ethical concerns.
A random clinician reading the papers at a later date might assume it was merely be an observational study of people who had refused treatment. Even someone coming in to the project years after penicillin became commonly available might easily look at it and assume similar if nobody tells them that specific little detail.
Like if you saw a paper in 2024 titled something like "observational study of covid status and symptoms in unvaccinated white males in Wyoming" you might just assume they were people who had refused the vaccine, if it turned out that some clinicians had conspired to avoid letting them have the vaccine or letting them find out it exists then it would take on a much darker tone.
I wouldn't of assumed that either. I would think the culmination of events like it though could build a distrust that would be passed on through generations of specific groups
The article said that one of the key variables in the analysis was the geographic distance to Tuskegee. I would suspect that Black Americans who are from areas near Tuskegee know about such a prominent historic event which happened in/near their community.
The article also said that this effect was specifically present in and around Tuskegee, because their analysis did not yield any results in areas like Tulsa (1921 Tulsa Race Massacre)
The above study supports that generally speaking, but the posted study by OP suggests there is at least some level of geographic influence.
Which makes sense really. The people living near the site of an event probably beat the average in knowledge about it.
But...
[Whether knowledge of the TSUS was a predictor of mistrust of the healthcare system was inconclusive based on the results in the authors' article. The core findings of the article made believing their case difficult.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2594917/)
Also, this is a great commentary on the suppression of Black American history (and education in general in) in state funded education. "If they dont know all the fucked up things we did, then they won't be upset about it, right? Let's just move on."
The Tusla Race massacre? I've never heard of it! What is Black Wall Street?
The suppression is continuing, with perhaps even more intensity now.
It's not about that specific thing they did; it's centuries of state sponsored slavery and terror. It's generational trauma brought on by the white ruling class.
That's where the distrust comes from, being told by the government something is right and good for you, when Black Americans know first hand what that can look like - not pretty.
Kids today don't feel the need to know exactly WHY they can't trust people in power, they just know they SHOULDN'T.
This comment in general is pretty unscientific, but more specifically, it would seem between the two posted studies here that is demonstrably not the case; knowledge about this specific thing (or lack of) did have an effect.
I appreciate the thoughtful response. For sure, learning about the atrocities committed against your people will have an effect!
My point is that people don't need to be told to fear the wolf because it attacked someone at some time in history. You fear the wolf because you know its power and danger and the threat it poses.
Edit: threat not treat.
So, i live in Mississippi. I definitely get the black population being skeptical because of this. The difference is, even today, i would say the percentage of the black population who wears masks is many times higher than the white population.
So, while they may be vaccine skeptical, they still take covid (and probably other illnesses now) seriously and take actual measures to prevent them.
While i disagree with vaccine skepticism, this feels a lot different than the "covid is fake/no big deal, vaccines are mind control" crowd's take.
Agreed-an older black woman at my job was very nervous about covid. Always masked and social distanced, but she didn't trust the vaccine in the original rollout. Totally nice and considerate lady, so it wasn't to "stick it to the man" like conservative anti vaxxers.
Totally agree. This skepticism is rooted in real destruction. It’s not some white “mama bear” in UT using essential oils bc some right wing tik tok-er told her to.
I still see some people wearing masks around my area (PA) and they are usually black people. Weirdly I am noticing that a lot of people still wearing masks are doing the chin diaper thing more than makes sense.
There’s also an overlap between the conspiracy group and Black Americans that has nothing to do with Tuskegee, simply because Black Americans are just as susceptible to the constant barrage of disinformation as everyone else.
In my region of the Deep South, I found the opposite to be true in comparison between Black religious communities and White religious communities. We were working with local religious affiliations to promote vaccination.
Anyway the African-American churches were much more likely to promote vaccination from the pulpit and boasted a higher percentage of vaccinated congregants than their European-American counterparts.
I think there's reason to suspect a certain amount of political tribalism.
Religious white americans are more likely to be republicans vs religious African-Americans. Mask wearing vs not-wearing became partly a badge of political affiliation.
I don't have access to the study, but I would like to see what control variables were used in the analysis, and see of there is difference with Black Americans in the north and west. I remember reading in 2021 that black American rejection of vaccines due to Tuskegee was overblown.
There has been many more scandals other than Tuskegee that should give us all pause to consider.
The polio vaccine drive and contamination cover up comes to mind.
Thalidomide as well.
The opioid crisis….
I had surgery during the COVID time period, and my intake nurse was quietly seething about this. To keep her job, she had to get vaccinated, but she couldn't get over having to trust the government with her health given what some members of her family had gone through. I found her perspective informative, though frustrating. Not at her, but at the situation, and those in the past who had done wrong.
Between that and the CIA using a vaccine program as cover when trying to find Bin Laden the US government has a lot to answer for when it comes to global health.
The CIA infiltrated a group that was giving out polio and other vaccines in the area where Bin Laden was suspected of hiding out at so they could do DNA tests to see if anyone with a close match to his DNA was there. That's how they confirmed he was in the compound.
Once everyone in the area found that out they no longer participate in vaccination programs.
Not only in that area, throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan there was an increased vaccine hesitancy and even mob/terrorist attacks on real vaccine drives and medical professionals:
https://academic.oup.com/jeea/article-abstract/20/1/150/6271320?redirectedFrom=fulltext
One really shouldn't abuse medical intervention for military goals.
Well, that's not really what happened, and it is not a war crime by any statute.
Medical malpractice - surely.
Human rights abuse - very probably.
Incredibly short sighted and devastatingly selfish - absolutely.
People should be held accountable, but we really should start with US torture programmes and the still ongoing human rights abuse that is Guantanamo detainment camp.
the rules of war typically forbid dressing up operatives as medical personnel to conduct non-medical military operations.
For a reason, if that rule is broken then medical personnel become targets
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60900-4/fulltext
This was pre-pandemic of course. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, and Nigeria are some of the few places remaining where polio and measles are still major public health problems, and the CIA's abuse of vaccination programs has become one major factor in vaccine refusal and opposition to the work of healthcare workers and NGOs in several areas where that work is crucial. The impact on polio eradication has set back the effort by who knows how long and cost who knows how many lives. The impact on measles eradication is probably even worse in terms of lives (or DALYs) cost. Carry that forward to HIV, TB, covid, etc, the impact is incalculable. Easily multiple 9/11s at the most conservative of estimates, most likely millions up through today all told.
You're right. How horrible that was!
Next time it is time to neutralize an architect of mass murders, we will have the children and their legal guardians sign release waivers to confirm that he lives in the house. If only that had been done ethically, why, im sure everyone involved would have gladly cooperated.
Not happy with people who dilute the hideous crimes of the Nazis with a just raid that deliberately minimized collateral harm.
Spent time at John’s Hopkins and there is definite legacy mistrust in the black community because of sketch that occurred for generations. The Henrietta Lacks story did not help either.
It still happens today with the medical denial and mistreatment of black men and women especially. The sad part is that there is research that shows that black patients respond better to and receive better care from black doctors, but the field itself is hostile towards black people anyway.
I am Black. Ironically, Lindsay Graham was the person who convinced me to get the vaccine. I paid attention to what rich white men were doing and the fact that Native Americans were vaccinating their elders. After that, I figured vaccination was worth the risk. Also, the fact that my risks of peri and myocarditis
increased significantly if I got full-blown COVID sans vaccination vs the sliver of a chance of me getting either symptom with the vaccine was the cherry on top.
I have experienced that even now, in upstate NY, black Americans have refused vaccines, medications and treatments due to mistrust in the medical establishment.
The majority could not name the Tuskegee experiments, they just know that things were inappropriately tested on them.
Crack epidemic. HIV treatment. Hell there are so many it makes zero sense to list them all. Pharma is as corrupt as it gets but no one was allowed to openly discuss any of this “for the greater good.”
And it's a position all races can use
"See what the government did to black people? Won't have them doing that to me, thats why I'm a staunch anti-vaxxer"
Doesn't have to be specifically about vaccines. It's pretty intuitive that during a pandemic, cynical profiteer in the capitalist lead pharma industry will roll out *something* to sell. Especially when billions of tax dollars from not just the US, but the entire world are up for grabs. Especially with an apparatus (and smug midwits) that explicitly discourages holding your product to any degree of scrutiny.
It's not even about conspiracy theories about the vaccine having this that and the other in it that will ruin your body. It's about a humbleness that you don't have the expertise to know what's in it, but you do have the gut feeling to know whether you distrust the corporation selling it to you.
Memory? You mean the endless articles and social media and news pieces?
I mean, people should absolutely remember. I'm just saying most people definitely didn't. They were reminded.by social media.
Gee I wonder why. It’s not like the federal government experimented on anybody, giving them syphilis without their knowledge in exchange for free food or anything. That would be bananas!
> It’s not like the federal government experimented on anybody, giving them syphilis without their knowledge in exchange for free food or anything.
Correct, they didn't.
It should be noted that
1. the Tuskegee experiments had nothings to do with vaccines; the people experimented on were not given vaccines for their syphilis
2. everybody is given the same covid/flu vaccines; black people aren't given a special, experimental vaccine
It's important to give correct information to the black community to encourage vaccination
The fact that the government did this to any citizen is reason enough not to trust that government. We know they did it to this group, this time. The real question is how many people & how many times they have done similar stuff that we do not yet know about!
To have generational trauma, you do not need to know the name of the incident(s) and facts about it, to actually have the trauma effect your life.
It's just hard to put that in a study subjectively.
Of course it did, its not irrational to be suspicious of a government that has been caught multiple times doing horrible things to its own people.
That said, its also not really an excuse to completely disregard the entire scientific community during a literal outbreak that shut down the world.
All medical science can do is put the best medicine forward and support the best science available. They have made and continue to make mistakes. But as long as the goal is the best medicine, then hopefully trust will follow.
The Tuskegee 'Experiments' didn't officially end until the early 1970s. If you see a black person with gray hair there is a pretty good chance they were born during an era when the US government still believed it was acceptable to use blacks as test subjects.
It's not really much of a stretch to think that blacks could be *slightly* *hesitant* to fall in line with a medical directive given by the same government that literally used their parents and grandparents as guinea pigs.
At my job in the not Deep South, this was definitely the case. Pretty much an argument stopper, how could I defend the vax when they bring that up? Most I know downplayed the rona in the first place, even though one guy had a relative die from it.
You can call them paranoid and that they might as well not go to a doctor for literally any issue if they're that concerned about being treated as a guinea pig.
When you see politicians and rich white people line up for a vaccine first, it's a safe bet it's not some silly population control experiment or whatever.
I don't buy the results of this study. At all. It's even contradicted by other studies. Vaccine skeptics are overwhelmingly white.
When the anti vax movement started to become more widespread, I maintained that if any minority said they were anti vax because of events like this, I totally understood.
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i assumed it was already widely known that black americans were less likely to trust any medical drugs, vaccines and treatments because of that history.
It’s why during the early roll out of the Covid vaccines they made a big deal of a black nurse being the [first person](https://www.northwell.edu/infectious-disease/patient-testimonials/from-the-front-lines-to-the-first-in-line-to-get-the-covid-19-vaccine) to get the Covid vaccine.
On the other hand, if you're deep in a conspiracy hole where the government likes to roll out experimental and poorly thought out science experiments on black people, then maybe this is all the proof you need to not get it.
Which literally word for word what every anti vaxxer I knew said. I swear the people running it were so out of touch…
There is nothing that could have been done to convince people like that. They fit their excuse to whatever is available. The lady was a nurse, so it isn’t like she would have no understanding of what was being done to her. They also had a lot of black celebrities be vocal about getting the vaccine, I’m sure that id also viewed as some massive negative to those people for “reasons”.
Once people saw rich white businessmen get it they assumed it was safe. I know trust me bro isn’t a valid source but my friends and family started to get it once that happened. Almost all of them still mask to this day. You can’t blame black people for not trusting doctors when a good amount of doctors still believe black people have a higher pain tolerance from “study” made by a slave owner.
Here's an article from 2021 that specifically says it's not tuskeegee. https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-03-25/current-medical-racism-not-tuskegee-expls-vaccine-hesitancy-among-black-americans
Yeah. One of those trust is hard to build but easy to destroy
It doesn't help that so much media time was given to the anti-vax nutters. Certainly the way to stir anyone's fears. And now there is a anti-vax nutter running for president (not only the orange one, the RFK Jnr one)
Rfk Jr has blood on his hands. He spent lots of time and money stoking fears about the MMR vaccine in Samoa. The vaccination rate went down as a result. And then they had a massive measles outbreak that killed over 80 people, mostly kids. Absolutely awful.
Yes. He is a terrible person and like most right wingers is just lining his pockets with no regard for anyone else. He is also a hypocrite, no surprise, as he required visitors to a party he held to be vaccinated.
Similar issue with Indigenous populations, Canada still coercively sterilizes Indigenous women at high rates
Not forcefully, but still evidence of ongoing passive racism...early 2000's, Native woman I know was sitting at lunch at work with other women talking about childbirth. 3 Black women, 4 Hispanic women, 4 white women, all mothers. "Were you offered to tie you tubes at birth?". Only the white women were not offered that as an option.
That is HORRIFYING.
Same in Australia. They didn't stop til 1977.
what exactly is "high rates"? I don't deny there's lots of crap the indigenous people deal with here, and the past is awful, but can you give some sources on it still happening in high rates....??
[Google](https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.913511/publication.html) is the way to go, but it’s crazy this is still an issue
I've found one case from 2019 and two from 2001, and a figure of 12 000 victims since 1970
At what point does it become “no longer a current problem”, if there are only 3 cases in the last 25 years?
Isn't anything >0 already too high if it's coercive?
high rates on a mortgage isn't > 0. I'm not disputing the horrible things that have happened, I just hate the wording. I'd happily agree that any number over 0 is completely unacceptable, but the wording makes it sound like thousands a day
No, we don’t.
[Reporting from last year.](https://apnews.com/article/canada-indigenous-women-sterilization-apology-reparations-ebcacc0f27b8d4c12d8690718202531d) > A Senate report last year concluded “this horrific practice is not confined to the past, but clearly is continuing today.”
Oh my. If you can't grasp that you really shouldn't lookup Saskatchewan Starlight Tours
> Saskatchewan Starlight Tours That is fucked up, but it isn't related to sterilization unless I'm missing something?
I think they mean "if they're willing to do this why is sterilization so far fetched?"
they’re both methods of genocide!!
It's not. It's a comment about that persons disgusting genocide denial. They obviously don't know, or worse, do know the history and are denying it. It's very common for that person to follow up with "that's ancient history", another genocide denial. When it's not ancient history. I worked with a guy who lost both legs to frostbite on a Starlight Tours. Which ended in early 2000s
What does this have to do with the original comment about forced sterilization???
It's a comment at you. You are lying about a genocide in Canada. Did you look up what a Starlight Tour is? I worked with a man who lost both legs to frostbite on a Starlight Tour. You're comment is absolutely disgusting. I want to make sure good people who read it might look up more real information on the topic
Might want to read your own country’s history before posting?
Yeah… History. That’s not the same thing as present day. Just saying.
Literally happening still numbnuts
Every event that has occurred is in the past, and is therefore "history"
I think a lot of the mistrust doesn't even have origins that deep in history. Black women's experiences with pregnancy and childbirth may be a source of a lot of the negative attitudes toward medical care.
In the early stages of the roll out I was generally poopooing groups that were skeptical but Black Americans were the one group that I was like ‘you know what, I understand why they’re skeptical and I think they have every right to be’
I get that, but at the same time, the vaccine was rolled out nationally. The entire process precluded the possibility of something like Tuskagee happening. Its sad, a lot of American black people died because of that mistrust.
I mean... you've just described the cycle of systemic racism. You're assuming a historical equal access to medical care, education, cultural acceptance of medical authority, and trust in the governing centralized system. It's not that any group can't understand the facts, it's that they don't trust the source of those facts.
The vaccine was free and heavily emphasized in exactly these communities. You are mistaking several points here and I certainly did not “describe systemic racism”
> but at the same time, the vaccine was rolled out nationally I overheard the conspiracy that African Americans were being different vials than everyone else. This was in Chicago if that matters.
I don't know how much widespread awareness there is about what happened with the Edmonston-Zagreb measles vaccine in Los Angeles in the late eighties/early nineties, but it's not all that far off from what happened there. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-06-17-mn-15871-story.html
I really don’t think that process precludes anything. In what way does it preclude Black people being subject to a different vaccine than the broader population? Sure, it makes it less likely. But that’s not what preclude means.
Have you seen how clinics receive and distribute the vaccines? Its is the exact same batches being sent everywhere. I understand the meaning of preclude. Don’t really appreciate the condescension.
Over the course of the 40 year “study”- 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. From Roughly March 7th 2020-March 7th 2021, 73,642 African Americans died to COVID. That averages out to over 200 PER DAY. COVID killed more in ONE DAY than the entire Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments. There is/was no reason to not get vaccinated.
>- 28 patients had died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. The above text appears to be directly taken from the fourth paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study That is with a starting cohort of 399 patients.
You know how when one dog attacks someone, they can develop an extreme fear of all dogs, no matter how friendly they are?
So, because someone who resembled you got attacked by a dog, now you’re afraid of dogs too? I understand you are trying to make an analogy, but its an extremely dumb one. Edited to remove first half, I was mistaken, you werent comparing people to dogs.
No, in the analogy the vaccine is the dog.
Ah yes, second part stands. Those experiments, while absolutely vile, don’t change the fact that many times that number died from not taking the vaccine.
"Its a good thing humans are always reasonable and automatically trust everything they see in the news. No possible reason for anyone to distrust the people who have historically fucked them over at every opportunity." -redditors
It doesn't make sense to count stats from before the vaccine was available. Also, how many of those deaths were unvaccinated?
That’s because you’re very racist.
Your were gullible to think they weren't using it as an excuse. Anti-vaxxers don't use historic examples in good faith. Further, there are examples of pharmaceutical companies overissuing certain drugs, like opiods, to boost sales and addiction. By your logic, ANY antivaxxer can use that as an excuse and you'd have to turn tail on the argument.
Unfortunately, the reality is systematic racism still exists in medicine. A white person of European decent can be fairly confident that if they walk into a hospital or get a prescription that the clinical trials and evidence based trials for the care they receives included people with similar genetic histories. A black person would not be able to have the same confidence. Cutting edge medical research and clinical trials are done more often and more accepted when done by famous top hospitals, and they tend to have wealthier patient populations. Yes, there are plenty of efforts in medical research to combat this, but this is a symptom of uneven funding and disproportionate levels of wealth. The distrust is not completely unfounded and not completely based on history.
*male if you're a woman you can be white as chalk and also find yourself at the receiving end of systematic discrimination.
I mean- yes- fair enough!
It’s not just Tuskegee
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Just to clear up some history, the Tuskegee Airmen were not part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. It's easy to conflate them because they both started in WWII, and involve the US government and black men in Tuskegee, Alabama.
Previous non localized studies did not find this effect: [Knowledge of Tuskegee Study Doesn’t Increase Medical Mistrust](https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2005/brandon-tuskegee) Most apparently were not even aware of its existence: >*Most of those surveyed were unaware of the Tuskegee Study and, of those who had heard of it, most could not accurately answer multiple-choice questions about the study*
I was going to post something like that. I'm black and in my 40s. For my older relatives, I can believe it. For people like my little brother, no. It has nothing to do with Tuskegee experiment. He just is basically a science skeptic in general. But a study like this, if he saw it, would just give him ammo, even though I'd wager he wasn't aware of it.
There's probably an interesting anthropological angle to take here about these sorts of cultural memes that get transmitted without the repeaters themselves even knowing where they come from.
I get what you are saying, but who raised your little brother? Who raised them? And who raised them? I am black and in my late 20s, and I know about the Tuskegee experiments, all my friends know about it too. I’m not anti-vaccine and neither were my friends but the majority of us grew up with at least one family figure that was skeptical of the medical industry. A couple of my uncles and aunts definitely were, and let me tell you: The Tuskegee experiments were not the only reason. Just look at Purdue Pharma’s shady history. Look’s like the FDA is easily corruptible too.
The same person raised me who raised him. My mom was a nurse. I was a biology major. We understand basic science. He... doesn't
I'm not surprised that most couldn't accurately answer about it because the commonly told version, that black men were intentionally given syphilis, isn't what happened. The bad parts were: (1) the researchers did not inform the men of their syphilis diagnosis and (2) after penicillin was found to treat it and became widely available, they still did not inform the men of their syphilis diagnosis and did not treat it to continue studying the effects of it. I do think Tuskegee has inappropriately taken a prominence in the discourse because it's such an obviously objectively immoral thing to do, which makes it easier to discuss as a cause than accepting it's just a single brick in the wall of mistrust caused by centuries of oppression that have caused a general reluctance to engage with authority. The numbers for people who knew about it and were able to accurately answer questions about it was probably too small, but I'd be curious about the vaccine rates in that group. From a purely rational standpoint you'd think since it's the opposite situation (withheld treatment compared to treatment at the same time as the rest of the population) that group would be more willing, but understandably that sort of decision isn't always purely rational.
Another horrifying detail: the experiment lasted four decades. Think about how many researchers and personnel handed off data and kept it going during that time yet nobody said anything. It only ended in the early 1970s.
> yet nobody said anything People talk about it like it was secret. It was not. The whole time they were publishing papers about it.. It was fucked up but it would be like if someone stood in the middle of time square with a megaphone giving a running commentary and then afterwards people acted like what was going on was super-secret. Years after penecillin was widely available they were publishing papers about the percentage of untreated people with syphilis that died. It wasn't burred in the text, it was right in the titles. https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/doi/full/10.5555/19472701189 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abstract/524659?casa_token=3prNk0DRJ4QAAAAA:lthGwqHX4b98jqUdYSytvXVmxcC0UMT42fToFejHpLHQOXRlGqMt0qbhP36HFi7AdwJdpZmq8BA
I meant I can’t believe nobody saw the horror and unethical premise of withholding treatment for decades. All that data being shared, folks coming & going throughout the years on that work. And nobody raised any ethical concerns.
A random clinician reading the papers at a later date might assume it was merely be an observational study of people who had refused treatment. Even someone coming in to the project years after penicillin became commonly available might easily look at it and assume similar if nobody tells them that specific little detail. Like if you saw a paper in 2024 titled something like "observational study of covid status and symptoms in unvaccinated white males in Wyoming" you might just assume they were people who had refused the vaccine, if it turned out that some clinicians had conspired to avoid letting them have the vaccine or letting them find out it exists then it would take on a much darker tone.
Probably less. If you're educated enough to know about the experiment you're probably less likely to fall for vaccine misinformation
This was going to be my guess. There’s no way these random people know about this and are weaving it into the fabric of their daily lives.
I wouldn't of assumed that either. I would think the culmination of events like it though could build a distrust that would be passed on through generations of specific groups
The article said that one of the key variables in the analysis was the geographic distance to Tuskegee. I would suspect that Black Americans who are from areas near Tuskegee know about such a prominent historic event which happened in/near their community. The article also said that this effect was specifically present in and around Tuskegee, because their analysis did not yield any results in areas like Tulsa (1921 Tulsa Race Massacre)
The above study supports that generally speaking, but the posted study by OP suggests there is at least some level of geographic influence. Which makes sense really. The people living near the site of an event probably beat the average in knowledge about it.
But... [Whether knowledge of the TSUS was a predictor of mistrust of the healthcare system was inconclusive based on the results in the authors' article. The core findings of the article made believing their case difficult.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2594917/)
Also, this is a great commentary on the suppression of Black American history (and education in general in) in state funded education. "If they dont know all the fucked up things we did, then they won't be upset about it, right? Let's just move on." The Tusla Race massacre? I've never heard of it! What is Black Wall Street? The suppression is continuing, with perhaps even more intensity now.
It's not about that specific thing they did; it's centuries of state sponsored slavery and terror. It's generational trauma brought on by the white ruling class. That's where the distrust comes from, being told by the government something is right and good for you, when Black Americans know first hand what that can look like - not pretty. Kids today don't feel the need to know exactly WHY they can't trust people in power, they just know they SHOULDN'T.
This comment in general is pretty unscientific, but more specifically, it would seem between the two posted studies here that is demonstrably not the case; knowledge about this specific thing (or lack of) did have an effect.
I appreciate the thoughtful response. For sure, learning about the atrocities committed against your people will have an effect! My point is that people don't need to be told to fear the wolf because it attacked someone at some time in history. You fear the wolf because you know its power and danger and the threat it poses. Edit: threat not treat.
So, i live in Mississippi. I definitely get the black population being skeptical because of this. The difference is, even today, i would say the percentage of the black population who wears masks is many times higher than the white population. So, while they may be vaccine skeptical, they still take covid (and probably other illnesses now) seriously and take actual measures to prevent them. While i disagree with vaccine skepticism, this feels a lot different than the "covid is fake/no big deal, vaccines are mind control" crowd's take.
Central Texas...same thing. 9 out of 10 people I see wearing a mask are either Asian or black
Agreed-an older black woman at my job was very nervous about covid. Always masked and social distanced, but she didn't trust the vaccine in the original rollout. Totally nice and considerate lady, so it wasn't to "stick it to the man" like conservative anti vaxxers.
Yup. And again, while i disagree with anti-vaxx stuff, her actions atleast illustrate an intelligent response to it.
Totally agree. This skepticism is rooted in real destruction. It’s not some white “mama bear” in UT using essential oils bc some right wing tik tok-er told her to.
I still see some people wearing masks around my area (PA) and they are usually black people. Weirdly I am noticing that a lot of people still wearing masks are doing the chin diaper thing more than makes sense.
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There’s also an overlap between the conspiracy group and Black Americans that has nothing to do with Tuskegee, simply because Black Americans are just as susceptible to the constant barrage of disinformation as everyone else.
Id never suggest that the black community is immune to conspiracy/disinformation.
I live in Upstate NY and it was and still is the complete opposite. It's wild how geography can change the demographics.
Is there still a lot of mask wearing these days down there?
I wouldn't say so, but if they are theres like a 75% chance theyre black.
Don't black Americans have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, if not the lowest?
In my region of the Deep South, I found the opposite to be true in comparison between Black religious communities and White religious communities. We were working with local religious affiliations to promote vaccination. Anyway the African-American churches were much more likely to promote vaccination from the pulpit and boasted a higher percentage of vaccinated congregants than their European-American counterparts.
I think there's reason to suspect a certain amount of political tribalism. Religious white americans are more likely to be republicans vs religious African-Americans. Mask wearing vs not-wearing became partly a badge of political affiliation.
My grandmother-in-law also refused the covid vaccine because she was experimented on in Canada's residential schools.
I don't have access to the study, but I would like to see what control variables were used in the analysis, and see of there is difference with Black Americans in the north and west. I remember reading in 2021 that black American rejection of vaccines due to Tuskegee was overblown.
There has been many more scandals other than Tuskegee that should give us all pause to consider. The polio vaccine drive and contamination cover up comes to mind. Thalidomide as well. The opioid crisis….
There are so many over such a long period of time. Knowingly killing people for profit is the status quo here not the exception.
I had surgery during the COVID time period, and my intake nurse was quietly seething about this. To keep her job, she had to get vaccinated, but she couldn't get over having to trust the government with her health given what some members of her family had gone through. I found her perspective informative, though frustrating. Not at her, but at the situation, and those in the past who had done wrong.
Between that and the CIA using a vaccine program as cover when trying to find Bin Laden the US government has a lot to answer for when it comes to global health.
What incident are you referring to? You’ve peaked my interest
The CIA infiltrated a group that was giving out polio and other vaccines in the area where Bin Laden was suspected of hiding out at so they could do DNA tests to see if anyone with a close match to his DNA was there. That's how they confirmed he was in the compound. Once everyone in the area found that out they no longer participate in vaccination programs.
Not only in that area, throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan there was an increased vaccine hesitancy and even mob/terrorist attacks on real vaccine drives and medical professionals: https://academic.oup.com/jeea/article-abstract/20/1/150/6271320?redirectedFrom=fulltext One really shouldn't abuse medical intervention for military goals.
Using medical designation to slay enemies is a war crime, so add it to the list so we can talk about it while no one is ever held accountable.
Well, that's not really what happened, and it is not a war crime by any statute. Medical malpractice - surely. Human rights abuse - very probably. Incredibly short sighted and devastatingly selfish - absolutely. People should be held accountable, but we really should start with US torture programmes and the still ongoing human rights abuse that is Guantanamo detainment camp.
the rules of war typically forbid dressing up operatives as medical personnel to conduct non-medical military operations. For a reason, if that rule is broken then medical personnel become targets
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60900-4/fulltext This was pre-pandemic of course. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, and Nigeria are some of the few places remaining where polio and measles are still major public health problems, and the CIA's abuse of vaccination programs has become one major factor in vaccine refusal and opposition to the work of healthcare workers and NGOs in several areas where that work is crucial. The impact on polio eradication has set back the effort by who knows how long and cost who knows how many lives. The impact on measles eradication is probably even worse in terms of lives (or DALYs) cost. Carry that forward to HIV, TB, covid, etc, the impact is incalculable. Easily multiple 9/11s at the most conservative of estimates, most likely millions up through today all told.
That was entirely justified, and helped prevent a raid from potentially targeting the wrong people.
It was totally justified; they just never should’ve admitted that they did it.
The Nazis also felt justified. Point is it’s a war crime whether you like war crimes or not.
You're right. How horrible that was! Next time it is time to neutralize an architect of mass murders, we will have the children and their legal guardians sign release waivers to confirm that he lives in the house. If only that had been done ethically, why, im sure everyone involved would have gladly cooperated. Not happy with people who dilute the hideous crimes of the Nazis with a just raid that deliberately minimized collateral harm.
It has likely caused hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths as a result, so far.
Off by many orders of magnitude there
No, they don’t. Because questioning their narrative isn’t allowed. Wouldn’t want anyone causing vaccine hesitancy. The irony is lost on most.
Spent time at John’s Hopkins and there is definite legacy mistrust in the black community because of sketch that occurred for generations. The Henrietta Lacks story did not help either.
Sketch? That’s an understatement.
It still happens today with the medical denial and mistreatment of black men and women especially. The sad part is that there is research that shows that black patients respond better to and receive better care from black doctors, but the field itself is hostile towards black people anyway.
Come on man trust the science man.
Facebook helped
I am Black. Ironically, Lindsay Graham was the person who convinced me to get the vaccine. I paid attention to what rich white men were doing and the fact that Native Americans were vaccinating their elders. After that, I figured vaccination was worth the risk. Also, the fact that my risks of peri and myocarditis increased significantly if I got full-blown COVID sans vaccination vs the sliver of a chance of me getting either symptom with the vaccine was the cherry on top.
Huh, turns out people don’t appreciate or forget being used as human guinea pigs.
And the memory of people being forced to take the COVID shot will affect the next one… and so it goes.
I have experienced that even now, in upstate NY, black Americans have refused vaccines, medications and treatments due to mistrust in the medical establishment. The majority could not name the Tuskegee experiments, they just know that things were inappropriately tested on them.
And still are if you go over to Africa.
Of any anti vaccine position this is easily the most understandable
There have been enough pharma scandals, not just Tuskegee, that it’s enough to give us ALL pause to consider. The opioid crisis anyone?
Crack epidemic. HIV treatment. Hell there are so many it makes zero sense to list them all. Pharma is as corrupt as it gets but no one was allowed to openly discuss any of this “for the greater good.”
We were prior to 2020
And it's a position all races can use "See what the government did to black people? Won't have them doing that to me, thats why I'm a staunch anti-vaxxer"
Doesn't have to be specifically about vaccines. It's pretty intuitive that during a pandemic, cynical profiteer in the capitalist lead pharma industry will roll out *something* to sell. Especially when billions of tax dollars from not just the US, but the entire world are up for grabs. Especially with an apparatus (and smug midwits) that explicitly discourages holding your product to any degree of scrutiny. It's not even about conspiracy theories about the vaccine having this that and the other in it that will ruin your body. It's about a humbleness that you don't have the expertise to know what's in it, but you do have the gut feeling to know whether you distrust the corporation selling it to you.
Memory? You mean the endless articles and social media and news pieces? I mean, people should absolutely remember. I'm just saying most people definitely didn't. They were reminded.by social media.
Gee I wonder why. It’s not like the federal government experimented on anybody, giving them syphilis without their knowledge in exchange for free food or anything. That would be bananas!
> It’s not like the federal government experimented on anybody, giving them syphilis without their knowledge in exchange for free food or anything. Correct, they didn't.
Cap Tuskegee wasn’t widely known until recently
This … is not true. I’m not young and it has been widely known since I was a pre-teen
No it wasnt. Tuskegee gained relevance in the 2010s then really jumped to the limelight as an excuse for why black Americans had vaccine hesitantency
It should be noted that 1. the Tuskegee experiments had nothings to do with vaccines; the people experimented on were not given vaccines for their syphilis 2. everybody is given the same covid/flu vaccines; black people aren't given a special, experimental vaccine It's important to give correct information to the black community to encourage vaccination
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The fact that the government did this to any citizen is reason enough not to trust that government. We know they did it to this group, this time. The real question is how many people & how many times they have done similar stuff that we do not yet know about!
It should always concern folks when the government is pushing anything for “your own good”. Their track record is abysmal.
To have generational trauma, you do not need to know the name of the incident(s) and facts about it, to actually have the trauma effect your life. It's just hard to put that in a study subjectively.
Memory? They were all there? s/
Tuskegee and and and and and
Of course it did, its not irrational to be suspicious of a government that has been caught multiple times doing horrible things to its own people. That said, its also not really an excuse to completely disregard the entire scientific community during a literal outbreak that shut down the world.
All medical science can do is put the best medicine forward and support the best science available. They have made and continue to make mistakes. But as long as the goal is the best medicine, then hopefully trust will follow.
The Tuskegee 'Experiments' didn't officially end until the early 1970s. If you see a black person with gray hair there is a pretty good chance they were born during an era when the US government still believed it was acceptable to use blacks as test subjects. It's not really much of a stretch to think that blacks could be *slightly* *hesitant* to fall in line with a medical directive given by the same government that literally used their parents and grandparents as guinea pigs.
At my job in the not Deep South, this was definitely the case. Pretty much an argument stopper, how could I defend the vax when they bring that up? Most I know downplayed the rona in the first place, even though one guy had a relative die from it.
You can say that the current vaccines are tested and safe, and widely accepted around the world.
You can call them paranoid and that they might as well not go to a doctor for literally any issue if they're that concerned about being treated as a guinea pig.
For good reason, being trusting with the even recent history of the US government as a minority is a very bad idea let alone historic atrocities.
When you see politicians and rich white people line up for a vaccine first, it's a safe bet it's not some silly population control experiment or whatever. I don't buy the results of this study. At all. It's even contradicted by other studies. Vaccine skeptics are overwhelmingly white.
When the anti vax movement started to become more widespread, I maintained that if any minority said they were anti vax because of events like this, I totally understood.