It’s time for an official apology — and perhaps compensation — for Tuskegee

It is a fact that many members of the African-American community do not get the COVID vaccine shots because they do not trust government medicine. Now, why is that? 

One of the most prominent answers is quite simple — and disturbing: From 1932 until 1972, a group of African-American men who lived in and near Tuskegee, Ala., were the subjects of what has been called the “Tuskegee Study.” This study involved 399 men who tested positive for syphilis and 201 others who were syphilis-free (the control group). The study was conducted under the auspices of the United States Public Health Service and other medical groups.

According to James H. Jones’ “Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,” the most comprehensive account of the Tuskegee Study, none of these men were ever told exactly what the study involved and what it hoped to reveal to medical science. They were simply told that they had “bad blood.” According to the Jones account of this horrid study, perhaps as many as 100 of these men died as a direct result of complications caused by syphilis. The study was stopped in 1972 only because Jean Heller, a reporter for the Associated Press, broke the story to the public. 

The heinous nature of this study lies both in the fact that these men were unwitting guinea pigs in an experiment that would never be allowed today and that they might well have been cured of syphilis had they been afforded proper treatment. Penicillin had become widely available by early 1945, and penicillin could have cured many of these men. But penicillin was not given to them. In fact, the men of the Tuskegee study were not even afforded the then-current state-of-the-art treatments for syphilis — mercury and a drug known as salvarsan. They were left totally untreated.

I first became aware of the Tuskegee study only a few years after its 1972 Associated Press revelation to the public (as opposed to the specialized knowledge that many medical professionals had during the course of the study). I was teaching history in 1976 at Jackson State University, one of our country’s many Historically Black Colleges and Universities. I was talking with an African-American colleague one day at lunch, and he asked me whether I knew about the Tuskegee study. I told him that I did not, and he gave me a brief synopsis of the study. He was from Alabama and had heard about it from older relatives. His relatives told him that Black men had been deliberately infected with syphilis — which was not true — and that you just could not trust the government when it came to your health.

Fast forward almost 50 years, and we get to COVID 19 and African-American reluctance to get vaccinated against the deadly virus. According to a  National Public Radio report from February 2021 and a recent Washington Post story, the memory of the Tuskegee study has had a significant negative effect on African-Americans, creating what The Post described as a “trust gap” with regard to government-sponsored medicine. Our country simply cannot afford such a trust gap, and it is time to do something about it.

Beyond President Bill Clinton’s 1997 apology for the Tuskegee Study, it’s time, I think, for the U.S. government to officially apologize for conducting this study on unwitting Black men. It’s time for U.S. Surgeon General Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy to issue a formal apology for the role the U.S. Public Health Service and the U.S. Surgeon General’s office played in conducting and prolonging this study. The Surgeon General from 1938-1948 was Dr. Thomas Parran. He was totally involved in allowing this study and he has already been disgraced by having his name removed from the building housing the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as dean, because of his role in the Tuskegee Study.

The men of the Tuskegee Study, both those with syphilis and those who were the controls, are now deceased. Whether their immediate families are due compensation for the unnecessary suffering their relatives endured is a question that Congress should take up. But the stain of the Tuskegee Study and its effects on today’s African-American community and its suspicion of government medical practices cannot be ignored any longer. It must be addressed and addressed promptly.

Col. James T. Currie (ret.), Ph.D., was executive director of the Commissioned Officers Association of the U.S. Public Health Service from 2014-20. He was an assistant professor of History at Jackson State University, one of our country’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 1976-1979.