We Must Accept a COVID

We Must Accept a COVID Vaccine

An Open Letter to Ward 8

When I was 20 years old, I spent two weeks in isolation in Bronx Lebanon Hospital with a life-threatening case of hepatitis. I vividly and poignantly recall my tearful mother at my bedside reading to me the passage from the Gospel of John where Jesus speaks to his apostle Philip. Twen

by Philip Pannell

ty years later a hepatitis vaccine was developed.

I pray that science will rapidly develop a vaccine for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which is disproportionately affecting and killing African Americans in our country. And if it is proven safe, I hope people will take it.

A few weeks ago, I contacted some friends in the scientific community to ask where I could ap

Community Activist Philip Pannell

ply to be involved in the testing of the vaccine. My friends politely told me that given my age and health situation I would not be a desirable candidate for experimentation.

The reluctance of some African Americans to embrace vaccines is understandable given what some of our ancestors endured in the name of scientific advancement. But we should be mindful that the medical and ethical obscenity of the infamous “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” was that it was conducted without informed consent. The subjects were hoodwinked into thinking they were receiving free medical care from the federal government and those with the disease received no treatment.

In 1932 the men were told that the study of “bad blood” would last six months but it was conducted for 40 years. The heinous inhumanity of the experiment was most tragically demonstrated by the fact that even when penicillin was proven to be a cure for syphilis, the men received no medicine. In 1994 the victims of that experiment and their immediate families received monetary repara