Joe Biden Blames Black Vaccine Hesitancy on Tuskegee Airmen Training Program
“By the way, many of the older members of that community had memories of experimentation on black Americans that were not told about, like what happened, with the, you know, Tuskegee airmen and all those tests,” Biden said. “And so there was a great reluctance.”
Biden spoke about vaccine hesitancy in the black community during an interview with YouTube star Jackie Aina.
But the Tuskegee Flight Training Program was
focused on testing and proving the ability of black Americans to fight in combat, not medical experimentation.
Biden was likely trying to refer to U.S. Government Public health officials
experimenting on black Americans with the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The government study, beginning in 1932, recruited 600 black Americans to study syphilis but scientists did not treat them while they suffered the effects of the disease.
That program was
exposed by the Associated Press in 1972 and finally shut down, prompting government hearings. The infamous program prompted the black community to be
suspicious of public health officials, contributing to their reluctance to get treatments developed and promoted by the government.