These descendants of Tuskegee Study participants are urging Black Americans to get vaccinated
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A new campaign from the Ad Council remembers one of the country’s darkest episodes of medical racism in the hope that it can help reduce vaccine hesitancy among Black Americans.
In 1932, Black sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama, were invited by the U.S. Public Health Service to take part in free treatment for bad blood—a highly unscientific term that referred to a variety of conditions including syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. But the USPHS, and later the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were knowingly deceiving them all along. The government’s plan, in what came to be known as the Tuskegee Study, was to track the natural course of syphilis by not giving the participants any treatment at all.