Friday, June 20, 2008
BARACK OBAMA
Did Michelle Obama Cancel a HPV Vaccine Program, Comparing It To Tuskeegee?
Tom Maguire finds an anecdote about Michelle Obama in the New York Times that is supposed to be flattering, but is in fact quite the opposite:
She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.
Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.
“She’ll talk about the elephant in the room,” said Susan Sher, her boss at the hospital, where Mrs. Obama is on leave from her more-than-$300,000-a-year job.
James Taranto observes, "The Tuskegee outrage was real. But the notion that the Tuskegee experiment—which began in the Jim Crow era (1932) and ended in 1972, eight years after the Civil Rights Act became law—reflects the attitudes of American governmental and medical institutions today is an urban legend, a superstition—and potentially a deadly one.
There is some controversy about the HPV vaccine, as some question whether it ought to be government policy to vaccinate all preteen girls for a sexually-transmitted disease. Nonetheless, if this characterization is accurate, Obama canceled a vaccination program not out of a concern about parental consent or encouraging promiscuity, but out of a supremely farfetched fear that white doctors at her own hospital had some secret, sinister motive for offering the vaccine to African-American girls.
06/20 08:32 AM
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