“That makes the virus particularly dangerous for African Americans, who because of environmental and economic factors have higher rates of those illnesses,” said Dr. Summer Johnson McGee, dean of the School of Health Sciences at the University of New Haven in the report. Dr. McGee is not surprised that African Americans are faring far worse during the coronavirus crisis because of the racism that has caused a lack of investment and poor healthcare in black communities.
This unfortunate revelation has brought to light something that many blacks have known for year, there is a huge health disparity gap in many African American communities throughout this country, especially in our urban areas. Access to healthcare and affordability have left many African Americans without regular doctor’s care.
But even when healthcare, and a vaccine, is available, many African Americans have a distrust of the medical system. This trepidation stems from years of some in the medical community taking advantage of poor vulnerable black people by doing involuntary experiments like what was done in the Tuskegee Study where 600 black men from Alabama were studied for 40 years starting in 1932 for untreated syphilis that was injected into them without their knowledge by the United States Public Health Service as stated in a paper from McGill University. This incident has come to be known as the “Tuskegee Effect.” The experiments ended when uncovered in a 1972 exposé by The Associated Press.
There was also the case of involuntary sterilizations done on many African Americans in the south in an attempt to control the African Americans population. According to PBS’ Independent Lens post in 2016, unnecessary hysterectomies were done on African-American women under the auspices appendectomies at a teaching hospital in North Carolina for training of their medical students.
Another incident of unethical, unauthorized medical procedures is the case of Henrietta Lack whose unique cells were harvested from her unknowingly when she was admitted into Johns Hopkins Hospital for cancer treatment in 1951. Those cells were so highly valued that scientist still use them in medical research today. They are the immortal HeLa cells.