The Long Tentacles of Racism in Science and Technology

It is indeed shocking that science and technology seeing black people as bodies that exist for questionable experiments would have long-term implications for the pandemic!

By the time Pfizer arrived, the meningitis epidemic had struck hundreds of children, leaving many dead or partially paralyzed.

The American pharmaceutical giant pledged to fight the 1996 outbreak in West Africa while testing a new drug, enrolling 200 stricken young patients in a clinical trial. Eleven died of the brain infection — an outcome Pfizer said was in line with results from standard treatment — and families in Kano, along with the state government, later received millions of dollars in a lawsuit settlement.

Now the memory looms over the coronavirus vaccine rollout in Nigeria’s second-largest city, sowing doubts around foreign-made shots that officials are rushing to distribute.

“I don’t trust anything from the West,” said Abubakar Sadiq Sulaiman, a 20-year-old college student in Kano, “because of what happened here.”

Vaccine fears driven by the history of medical experimentation in Africa threaten to undermine the battle to end the pandemic, health officials say, as several nations kick off inoculation campaigns this month.

Nigeria has sought to ease anxieties, deploying teams of public health educators to meet with religious leaders, village chiefs, shop owners, fishermen — voices with sway in their communities. Hesitancy to accept medicine from overseas slowed polio eradication in some areas, and leaders don’t want to see a repeat.

But videos invoking the Pfizer trial and other controversial cases continue to circulate on WhatsApp and Twitter.

“We cannot just dismiss the skepticism,” said Faisal Shuaib, head of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, which is in charge of the rollout. “We have to recognize that people have their own concerns. We need to listen to them, and then we have to do the extra work that is required.”

Like in the United States, the choices that the medical and scientific professions and technology companies of seeing Black people and other people of color as those who can be experimented upon, whose pain can be ignored, who are marginalized in terms of “normal” medicine have enormous consequences that can’t be ignored.

If you were Nigerian, why wouldn’t you take your chances with COVID over anything Pfizer offered?