Historically, Medical Exploitation Like This Is Nothing New

Doctor takes blood pressure
Cydney Smith
April 16, 2020

Two French doctors recently divulged their desire to test coronavirus vaccines on African people, comparing them to sex workers who “don’t protect themselves” to justify their racist proposal. Here’s why, coming from the medical community, this is not surprising at all.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

This 1932 Tuskegee study was designed “to document the natural history of syphilis.” It did so by NOT treating 600 mostly poor, illiterate Blacks already infected, never disclosing to patients that their condition was treatable!

The Relf Sisters’ Sterilization Abuse

In 1973, doctors used a federally-funded clinic to illegally and permanently sterilize two young sisters, ages 12 and 14. Why? As a method to control the population of Black people throughout the impoverished South. Hard to believe eugenics programs like this were ever legal.

Henrietta Lacks

This woman involuntarily revolutionized medicine with her cancer cells … cells doctors snatched from her body AFTER her death in 1951 without consent, compensation, or the family’s knowledge! 

Though doctors used her cells to develop multiple vaccines and treatments, she nor her family received a DIME from the billions of dollars her cells generated.

"Father of Gynecology" 

Believing Black women didn’t feel as much pain as white ones, Dr. J. Marion Sims experimented on countless enslaved, pregnant Black women without anesthesia to establish the field of gynecology. Not all of our ancestors survived his brutal experiments.

Due to this troubling history, we must be on guard for any efforts they propose to start using Black folks as lab rats!

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