Blacks 'Injected' With Syphilis? Never Happened

One peculiar footnote of the Jeremiah Wright controversy has been the repetition -- by educated black men on national television -- of a stubborn myth. That the U.S. government "injected black men with syphilis."

Rev. Wright said from the pulpit, in a video clip shown on Fox News: "The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment! They purposely infected African-American men with syphilis!"

Wright is wrong. That's not what the Tuskegee experiment was.

In the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," federal researchers refused to treat a group of black men who already had syphilis, long after a cure had been found.

Instead, doctors treated these men like laboratory animals, studying the course of the disease over decades.

The Tuskegee experiment was the most shameful episode in the history of the U.S. Public Health Service. President Bill Clinton apologized on behalf of the nation in 1997.

But the government did not infect black men with syphilis.

To invoke the Tuskegee experiment to suggest that the government invented AIDS to kill black people, as Rev. Wright did... that dishonors the truth. There is no excuse for it. It must stop.

Yet here's what Obery Hendricks, a professor at New York Theological Seminary, said on "The O'Reilly Factor" Monday night in defense of Rev. Wright: "We do know the government injected black men with syphilis."

On "Hardball with Chris Matthews" on Tuesday, journalist Ed Gordon said it's "not so far-fetched" to suppose that AIDS is weapon of genocide... considering that "the government was giving syphilis to black men."

Likewise, CNN contributor Roland Martin said last Friday: "I was watching another channel where they played a sermon where [Rev. Wright] said that America infected African-American men with
syphilis, called the Tuskegee experiment. That actually did, indeed, happen."

No. It. Did. Not.

And the only reason Obery Hendricks, Ed Gordon and Roland Martin weren't humiliated on national television is because Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews and Anderson Cooper are more ignorant about black history than they are.

I can't believe that none of those well-educated black gentlemen has read the highly praised book "Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment." Or seen the HBO movie "Miss Evers' Boys."

I recommend they do so before popping off again in public about the Tuskegee experiment. Same goes for Jeremiah Wright.

Comments

[ErinG]

Oh, I see, the government only went so far as to withhold treatment from black men in order to study how syphilis spreads and kills.

[booksnmore4you]

Right. And to where would it spread and kill in the segregated south? To Blacks - to partners, and from mother to child.

[Blazhay]

one thing that wasn't pointed out by the author is that not only did the government withhold treatment, they also did not tell the men they had the disease. Hence, the men were unable to tell what they had and if it was infectious. Think about how many people had gotten infected based on the government's destructive tendencies. Let's also add that if the government willfully used this men as guinea pigs and watched the disease progress in them until they died a slow painful death, I don't see what inhibits the goverment from injecting uninfected men with syphillis.

The point is you can't prove that the goverment didn't inject black men with syphillis, they've only admitted to the experiments. So for the author to start trying to equivate some moral equvalence is simplhy shameful

[FogBelter]

The US Defense Department has a division dedicated to Chemical and Biological Warfare ... it's not farfetched to believe that department is engaged in the development and refining of disease for use in warfare. The US did, in fact, provide small pox and diphtheria contaminated blankets to troublesome Indian Tribes during the settlement of Nation, and then there was this ...

"SAN FRANCISCO - Fifty-one years ago, Edward J. Nevin checked into a San Francisco hospital, complaining of chills, fever and general malaise. Three weeks later, the 75-year-old retired pipe fitter was dead, the victim of what doctors said was an infection of the bacterium Serratia marcescens.

Decades later, Mr. Nevin's family learned what they believe was the cause of the infection, linked at the time to the hospitalizations of 10 other patients. In Senate subcommittee hearings in 1977, the U.S. Army revealed that weeks before Mr. Nevin sickened and died, the Army had staged a mock biological attack on San Francisco, secretly spraying the city with Serratia and other agents thought to be harmless."

From "Of Microbes and Mock Attacks - 51 Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities"
by Jim Carlton, Wall Street Journal.

http://www.rense.com/general15/ofmicrobesandmock.htm

Just because Rev Wright sounds paranoid it doesn't mean his fears don't have some grounding in the truth.

[theblueAmerican]

but not in this case.

[FogBelter]

If you work for the Defense Department in the Chemical and Biological Weapons Area and are willing to forgo your security restrictions to discourse with evidence that Reverend Wright's concerns are completely unfounded I would welcome the correction ...

If not, then individuals all sides of the question are engaging in speculation ...

[WASanford]

The agent released from ships in the San Franciso Bay was the bacateria Bacillus glogigii. It has never been shown to be dangerous to humans. The military used this bacteria because it was the same size of pathogens that might be used in germ warfare and they needed to know how well it would spread.
No one could have anticipated that this test would harm anyone and there is still some doubt as to what actually happened to Mr. Neven or the other 10 patients. If they were infected with Serratia Marcewscens it may have come from somewhere else.

[FogBelter]

But it doesn't change the fact that the US Government used American Citizens as guinea pigs without their knowledge ... a bit disconcerting I would say.

[jason10006]

"Creating AIDs" was far beyond the cabibility of science back in the 70s...and certianly in the 50s, when scientists now think the first isolated cases appeared. Period.

[dollphingurl]

and you know what science was capable of in the 70s? my you must have maaad inside connections

[sunzen]

It reminds me of war tactics in Europe when they would through a body infected with the plague over the castle wall during a seige. Or when the spanish would infect the indians with disease and wipe them out all over the americas.

[mponti]

So Mr. Mills has set the record straight. The government didn't infect the men. Ok? Nor did it infect the 40 wives who contracted syphillis from the untreated black men or the 19 children who contracted the disease at birth. Technically, it was the largely poor, uneducated, infected black sharecroppers who did it. Right?

[sunzen]

We know that the Govt. did give people AIDS...Jus­t ask the hemaphiliac community.­..the Govt. new the blood supply was compromise­d/contamin­ated and allowed many blood transfusio­ns...remem­ber Ryan White or the thousands of others that died. Our Govt. has infected many people and countless Chimpanzees (our closest animal relative 98% genetically identical)­...Just face it Humans are sick black and white! Its not a black white thing its a human evil thing...

[WASanford]

No you're wrong! Our government does not distribute either whole blood or serum, that's done by the American Red Cross. Aids got a head start, especially in San Francisco, because no one was aware of the cause of the infection. It took some time to find that it was caused by a virus that was transferred person to person by the sharing of bodily fluids.
There is an engrossing book on the subject titled "And The Band Played On" written by SF Chronicle journalist Rady Shifts, Published in 1983, St. martin's Press.

[clevelandchick]

It wasn't that the government distributed the tainted blood, it's that when the government knew the blood was tainted they did not inform the public. And while I didn't read the book 'And the Band Played On' I did see the HBO move version.

The crime of the gov't wasn't in distributing, it was they had enough evidence to know the blood supply was tainted and did nothing.

[1849]

Try reading "Medical Apartheid" by Harriet Washington for some of the medical experiments carried out on African Americans.

[radmul]

I think you make a distinction without a difference. By leaving these men untreated they undoubtedly allow the disease to spread no matter how carefully they may have tried to prevent that from happening effectively giving syphilis to black people.

[IngeniousGirl]

David, you are strictly right, but not telling the entire story. "The Body Hunters" by Sonia Shah exposes testing, new drugs on the poorest patients and details the Tuskegee experiments to watch the African American men die. In fact, each victim was transported with great fanfare to the hospital as if they had just one some big prize, they were duped. And long after penicillin in the 1940's the Public Health service "clung to its plan" and "conspired with local draft boards to withhold the army's standard syphilis treatment from any Tuskegee subject drafted into the service".
The US Public Health Service paid two hundred prisoners, $100 each to be injected with gonorrhea as government doctors watched, hoping to learn about its transmissi­on..." In another study they infected 800 prisoners with malaria by using mosquitoes while Life Magazine hovered nearby photographing the placement of the insects on the stomachs of the prisoners.
While the last two examples are not African American centric, you can look at the studies and determine the ethnicity if you choose, likely poor Americans at a minimum. At face value the US Government deliberately infected prisoners with gonorrhea.
The Tuskegee study roared into American headlines as a prime example of "crimes against humanity" followed by Senate hearings and a $1.8 billion dollar lawsuit as the subjects of Tuskegee had gone on to unwittingly to infect 22 women, 17 children and 2 grandchildren. The government paid each subject about $37,000 who was still alive.
The only reason the Tuskegee debacle was not repeated is that the public realized the "folly of allowing the moral integrity of scientists to suffice as protection for experimental subjects."
The National Research Act was passed in 1974, Bill Clinton apologized to the Tuskegee victims and we got some oversight.
Mind you this all started with Rockefeller’s doctor, Mark Boyd, injecting Plasmodium falciparum malarial parasite into black patients demented with syphilis at a Florida Hospital, an outrageous treatment in light of the fact that white patients were treated with the mild form of this parasite as the standard regarded treatment. No law required him to get permission, but he did so he could have autopsy rights. That was when Dr. Taliaferro Clark conceived of watching syphilis patients - uneducated sharecroppers in Macon Alabama.
So there is always more to the story then black and white. In this case we have all kinds of shades of gray and a muddied past which needs the light of day to further understanding, not division which seems your article is intended to shut down this important discussion of past transgressions so we can move forward and heal the wounds.
It is totally irrelevant whether these black men were injected with syphilis. Our government knowingly withheld treatment that would have cured them of this disease and at the same time began a practice of purposefully infecting other innocents with gonorrhea and malaria. To attempt to ascribe some sort of moral equivalency test by mincing words won’t begin to change the facts of this horrific story.

[dollphingurl]

InGenious:

gurrrllll friend, i'm skurrred of you! you betta make it plain for the people in the cheap seats LOL.

[Obamaalltheway]

HEY MR MILLS - YOU NEED TO READ "The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment" by Borgna Brunner...­Great great article. And it explains how the government never told the 399 black men that a)they never had syphilis - and b) never planned on treating them to cure. They were treated like ginnepigs in labratory.­..

[FreedomsRoad]

This guy is looking to make his name on the backs of Black Americans. He's a cliche. If you are going to do an "expose" of a commonly held fallacy, standard practice is to provide clarifying facts. That he stops short of this, rather linking to one non-scholarly work of non-fiction and a commercial fiction special for cable television tells you the level of intellectual rigor to which he holds himself.

This type of bigotry is what's wrong with America. Get it together, David Mills. Use your platform to spread truth not muddy the waters.

This is pure Agit-prop for the race war.

[Damu]

To research "racism in the blogosphere" google Wikipedia and punch in "David Mills."

[sunzen]

Damu Smith is this you? Quit being a victim. LOL

[chronic]

Wright is wrong. That's not what the Tuskegee experiment was.

In the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," federal researchers refused to treat a group of black men who already had syphilis, long after a cure had been found.





*OK so whats the difference? Withholding treatment is better than infecting some purposely?

Withholding treatment that is a cure is even more barbaric and evil!!!*

[Ramirez]

Certainly both versions - the truth and the legend - are evil and equally barbarous, but that's not the point.

The difference is this:

Rev. Wright, Obery Hendricks, Ed Gordon and Roland Martin use the story of the injection of syphilis at Tuskegee to add logic to the widespread urban legend that the CIA created AIDS and introduced it into the African-American community. One belief adds credibility to the other.

Both beliefs are wrong. Unfortunately the second belief permits AIDS to spread within the African-American community due to distrust of governmental preventative measures.

The study at Tuskegee was horrible beyond words. It does not need embellishment.

[Eternal]

You are factually correct they did not "inject" those men but they did someting almost as bad. They mislead them into thinking they were receiving treatment and allowed to infect their wives who then gave birth to children with infected with "Chronic Shyphillis"

So, yes you could argue they did not introduce the infection into the men (and be factually correct), the same could not be said for the level of responsibility for the infectons introduced to their wives and children, perhaps even worst.

The moral wrong remains no matter if the men were "injected" or if passed to spouse and child by misleading them,

In the end the US Government caused the infection of innocent people, for 40 years.

The CDC discusses this topic on their website here http://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm

but without the detail the topic deserves especially the impact this study had on the children of these men born infected.

[sunzen]

Dirty Needles in the 30's they gave people the disease...­they reused needles!

[sunzen]

I have a question..­.When a Govt. is capable of Dr. Mengele type experiments then anything is possible correct? Do you have proof that when they were taking blood tests of all these poor black men that they were using clean needles? We just had that clinic in Las Vegas using dirty needles and giving people Hepatitis and who knows what...I will bet you they were using needles to draw blood over and over again...th­ey did not care about the health of these people and it started in the 30's when they were not as careful. So either they did it knowing full well that these men would get sick or they did it out of apathy.