In mid-April, the CDC announced that Black Americans, while only about 13% of the U.S. population, “might be disproportionately affected by COVID-19.” Among roughly six hundred hospitalized COVID-19 patients with known race/ethnicity, CDC found that one-third (33%) were black. In New York City the death rates have also been substantially higher among both Black and Hispanic Americans than among White or Asian Americans.
In a June interview with TIME magazine, Melinda Gates referenced these findings and while reiterating her husband’s talking point that “the way out of COVID 19 will be a vaccine,” she embellished her remarks with a race-riots-timed twist, stating that the COVID-19 vaccine “needs to go out equitably.” In her view, “equitably” means that “black people . . . and many other people of color” need to be near the top of the vaccine waiting list.
Among observers who understand that coronavirus vaccines are, by definition, experimental and who are familiar with the Gates family’s vaccine agenda, Madam Gates’ remarks immediately sparked concerns. And while the drive-by media tries to dismiss the concerns as “silly conspiracy theories,” U.S. medial history provides reasons not to take her statements at face value. In the era of COVID-19, two historical examples—the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study and the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck—seem worth reviewing.
The shadow cast by the Tuskegee syphilis study is noteworthy in numerous respects, not least of which is its astounding duration and the fact that it only ended because journalists finally exploded the story and made it impossible to continue.
The “unquestionably illegal” Tuskegee study, carried out by the U.S. Public Health Service of which the CDC is a part, began in 1932 and continued for four decades. Government researchers coldly used the study to assess the “natural history” of syphilis in 399 black men with latent syphilis to which the agency denied both informed consent and treatment.
An after-the-fact timeline currently on the CDC website shows that it was in 1936 that the investigators made the decision to “follow the men until death.” From the outset, the researchers were comfortable not only withholding treatment but also actively working to keep the men in the dark about available treatments.
By 1972, only 74 men from the original group survived. Along the way, 128 men died directly of syphilis or related complications, at least 40 spouses were infected and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. In 1969, three years before a whistleblower helped the media expose the study, the CDC was still “reaffirm[ing]” the need for the study and “gain[ing] local medical societies’ support.”
The Tuskegee study had moved from being a singular historical event to a powerful metaphor symbolizing racism in medicine, misconduct in human research, the arrogance of physicians, and government abuse of Black people.
Medical historians have described strong “affinities” between eugenics and public health, affinities that helped justify decades of involuntary sterilization of women and men of all races and ethnicities.
In 1924, Virginia formally adopted SB 281, the Eugenical Sterilization Act but it was not widely used until after the Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell in 1927, endorsing the sterilization of one Carrie Buck, a poor young white woman from Charlottesville, untruthfully deemed by the state of Virginia to be “feebleminded.” In total 7,325 plus individuals, 62% of which were female, were forcibly sterilized in Virginia for being “mentally ill” or “mentally defective.” Throughout the country an estimated 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized in the 20th century.
To understand the treatment of Carrie Buck and others, you must understand beliefs popular during the early 20th Century based on the science of Eugenics — improving the human race by control of breeding. The Eugenics movement grew from the core idea of evolution; primarily those espoused by Charles Darwin and spanned the political spectrum from conservatives to radical socialists of the day who believed that the survival of the human race should be under the control of those who were wealthy, more intelligent and responsible. They believed that “superior humans” must direct their own evolution by preventing the breeding and interbreeding with “inferior stock,” i.e. the poor, Jews, defectives, blacks, etc.
Today, forced sterilization is a war crime under the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court (article 2.b.xxii). The author of a 2016 book about eugenics has noted that America’s “cutting-edge” eugenics sterilization ideas and practices provided a template that the Nazis were later only too happy to borrow. He also observed that when the Supreme Court rendered its “ugly” decision, still on the books today, the Court radically distanced itself from being a “temple of justice.”
One of the reasons that the Buck v Bell decision continues to reverberate is that the Justices relied heavily on the legal precedent established by Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 case that allowed mandatory smallpox vaccination.
As avowed eugenicist Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it at the time, “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.” Referring to Buck, her mother and the child that Buck had prior to her forced sterilization, Holmes also cavalierly wrote in his decision, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Modern-day jurists and powerful elitist like Bill and Melinda Gates are now attempting to lasso the narrow 115-year-old Jacobson decision into providing the rationale for forced coronavirus vaccination.
Source: Historical Lapses in Public Health Ethics: Will Gates-Funded COVID Vaccine Human Trials Be Business as Usual? August 12, 2018, This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc.; Eugenics In Virginia, Franklin County Virginia Patriots.
