The men were denied access to a cure, even when one became widely available. The study came to an end nearly four months after a July 25, 1972, AP report by reporter Jean Heller. In observance of the 50th anniversary of Heller’s groundbreaking investigation, the AP is republishing the original report.
WASHINGTON (AP) EDITOR’S NOTE On July 25, 1972, Jean Heller, a reporter on The Associated Press investigative team, then called the Special Assignment Team, broke news that rocked the nation. Based on documents leaked by Peter Buxtun, a whistleblower at the U.S. Public Health Service, the then 29-year-old journalist and the only woman on the team, reported that the federal government let hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama go untreated for syphilis for 40 years in order to study the impact of the disease on the human body. Most of the men were denied access to penicillin, even when it became widely available as a cure. A public outcry ensued, and nearly four months later, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” came to an end. The investigation would have far-reaching implications: The men in the study filed a lawsuit that resulted in a $10 million settlement, Congress passed laws governing how subjects in research studies were treated, and more than t
Feb 24, 2021 4:59 PM EDT
“‘Are we going to be guinea pigs for the vaccine?’”
For months, Dr. James Hildreth’s sister had been asking questions like this.
While public health officials were urging Americans to take measures to help stop the coronavirus, high rates of infection within Black communities fueled his sister’s mistrust, said Hildreth, the president of Meharry Medical College, an historically Black institution in Nashville. She had no desire to be vaccinated, and thought officials wanted people like her Black people “to prove the vaccine is safe so others will take it.”
Those concerns have been echoing from communities across the U.S., according to Hildreth, a member of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force. He also has worked as a Food and Drug Administration adviser on the veting of the COVID-19 vaccines’ safety and effectiveness for their emergency use authorization. He knows whose lives ar