COVID Vaccine Trials Seek Black & Latinx Participants, But History of Medical Apartheid Sows Mistrust

As President Trump pushes to release a coronavirus vaccine before the November election, a National Institutes of Health report details how the process could be slowed by a lack of participation in vaccine studies by African American and Latinx people, many of whom mistrust the U.S. healthcare system due the history of racist medical exploitation. The written history of medicine, the canon, has been carefully curated to elide the experience of African Americans," says medical ethicist Harriet Washington, author of Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present."