Medical Racism

A new lawsuit exposes an old crime.

Two Black families have just filed a lawsuit against the federal government because their babies were used as test subjects in a vaccine trial without their parents’ consent. Tissue from their 1960s autopsies was used to develop an RSV vaccine now generating billions of dollars a year.

But if you know history, you know this has happened before.

In the 1840s, a doctor named J. Marion Sims performed repeated painful vaginal surgeries on three enslaved Black women — Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey — without their consent and without anesthesia. They call him the father of modern gynecology.

From 1932 to 1972, Black men infected with syphilis were deliberately left untreated in the Tuskegee experiment so the government could observe the disease destroying their bodies.

In 1951, cancer cells were taken from a Black woman named Henrietta Lacks without her consent and used to generate billions in medical research.

In the 1990s, Black and Latino boys in New York City were injected with a dangerous drug called fenfluramine to test whether their brain chemistry could predict criminal behavior.

And in 2021, we learned that remains of victims of the 1985 MOVE bombing, when Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a Black neighborhood, had been used in Ivy League classrooms without the families’ consent.

Historian Harriet Washington documents many of these incidents in her book, Medical Apartheid. But this is not ancient history.

So what can we do? Demand criminal accountability from the researchers. Demand reparations for Black families. And demand federal law to stop this from happening again.